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Seth Cluett, "Forms of Forgetting"
Working with the themes of memory and forgetting, as well as the role of attention in listening, Cluett's latest work is highly conceptual.  Forms of Forgetting is a lengthy droning work where Cluett toys with these themes from a sonic perspective, sometimes hypnotic and sometimes drifting off into silence.  Passages are quiet and hushed enough to be ignored, just to come back with an undeniable force and intensity that cannot be forgotten.
Consisting of a single, nearly 56-minute piece, Forms of Forgetting is constructed from two years of live experimentation, art installations, and mobile compositions that blend together into a calming, yet simultaneously heavy work.  The beginning is not forceful, but stays sustained in tone with only the most minor changes, scaling back after about the first 10 minutes.  From there it builds to a subsonic vibration and higher pitched warbling, almost like a bell ringing, and the tones reach a leaden density.
At this point, Cluett's composition becomes a monolith, consuming and absorbing all sound around it.  The sheer sustained tone does a superb job of erasing memory of the subtleties that preceded it.  The dense tones have a layered, metallic quality to them that just adds to their intensity, like an entire universe of vibrating bells.  As the music seems to reach its critical mass of force, Cluett dials things back somewhat.
From here the piece becomes more bleak and introspective.  Like depressing memories from the past, the tones drone less, and the space around them becomes more open and hollow.  Cleaner tones and heavier low end moments characterize the final portion, building to a vaguely abrasive crescendo before retreating to a more stereotypical early electronic music modular type sound.  The ending moments conclude the work with a long, quiet fade out.
As surely his intent, moments of Forms of Forgetting are heavy, forceful, and anything but easily ignored or forgotten.  Other segments, however, Cluett delves more into a hypnotizing, understated world of sound that trails off into the background, at times being easily drowned out by any ambient sound that might be around.  The whole piece works best due to the sum of these parts, the mundane and the gripping, much like memory and experience in the real world, powerfully succeeding with the concept Cluett intended.
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