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Compound Eye, "The Origin of Silence"
The ringing of the bells and the long carrier tone that eventually emerges beneath it signals the beginning of a descent into the underworld. Two tracks on each side carry me down an icy river of song. The ingredients are minimal, but a good cook can do a lot with just a few things, and I never felt heavy or gross from a cluttered presentation or an over-saturation of fatty content. This sonic fuel burns clean. And like any good meal the nourishment derived from the listening experience strengthened my nervous system, while none-the-less tuning it to alien frequencies. Here is an example of automatic music, and the methodology produces similar unconscious material as that evoked in automatic writing. It all makes for a fascinating foray into electronica as prepared by such experienced exemplars of the craft as Drew McDowall and Tres Warren.
I’m sure there are psychic messages contained in the coiling grooves of this clear vinyl LP. Being of a transparent nature they seep into my brain in slow trickle of melting tones a little over a half hour long. Yet that time stretches out and dilates in strange ways. The clock keeps ticking but my subjective experience of it is wobbly. I find myself looking for landmarks in "A Terrain of Constant-Low Intensity" and it is in this piece that I find most of them. The steady rhythm of bells starts out fast. Then, as the warm fuzz of an over-driven tube amp drone comes along, sound events slow down, moving into the supreme moment of kairos. And to me, this is what all excellent music will do: take me out of myself and the concerns of my daily trivial mind and into a moment of emergence where the deeper strains of true thought live. Again, this is akin to automatic writing in the way a steady stream is brought forth from deep chthonic currents.
Next the imagination casts about in darkness like a flashlight moving into less familiar territory. As the name suggests "Frying Oil Transient Aura Detector" is a song of mystery. Here the body of the song has been lubricated into a slippery, sensual mix of shifting, distorted timbres. The personality of the piece glows around the edges in an extended enunciation of itself. Without plot, it is free to meander through its own landscape, create its own map, and ultimately arrive at a destination a paltry piece of music, composed according to formulas and styles, would never be able to find.
Flipping the record over the disorientation into foreign domains continues with "Hox Cascades," a short but luminescent passage about as familiar as a half remembered dream. Personally, these are the kinds of sounds I like to bathe in, to fill my house with, and to spend my time among. Pedestrian pop is readily available, and thoughtless noise is also easy to find. Introspective provocations, not so much. When the short track ends, I move into "Mountain Village Malaise" as a beat returns to the proceedings, coaxing my neuro receptors back into a vague semblance of normality. The steady low-end bass pulse is still trance inducing and weird, while hallucinatory guitar-like swishes phase in and out. Buzzing sine waves float above in a higher register. This is a tribal music for loners who’d rather drift along in their own fanciful stereo daydreams. In doing so I found myself at home among the cavorting creatures conjured up by this auditory phantasmagoria, there, dancing between the edges of silence.
The first pressing of this 200 gram virgin clear viny was in an edition of 250. Sorry, no samples.
