Even the experimental assembly sounds promising: for one of SSTUDIOS’s new projects, Tim Hecker and Daniel Lopatin, two explorers of a new sound-world, were locked up in a studio in order to spontaneously fiddle about with the data-base »Instruments Of The World«. What came out is a unique musical world made of soothing sphere-loops and ambient drones, along with noise, mic-samples and controlled feedback. Every now and then, there are melodies of heavy string-synths, altered chorals or strangely off-pitch organs finding their way to the listener. The original material has been modified so strongly that it is hard to match a single sound to an actual instrument. But that’s not all, even our general acoustic perception is being tested: glimmering sounds in the upper spheres of our hearing levels, like goose bumps on our ear drums, are alternating with distorted sounds of – what it seems – cable breaks, a kind of analogue glitching, so to speak. Extremes in tension and relaxation are often very close to one another. Altogether, it reminds us of the sound-aesthetics released by Lopatin as Oneohtrix Point Never with »Replica«, as well as Hecker’s Output »Ravedeath, 1972«: gloomy, demanding, strangely beautiful and definitely peculiar, if not one of a kind. The experiment was well worth it – even if the result is less surprising than one might have expected.
Blue Lake
The Animal
Tonal Union