Back in 2019, Adobe, the software company that for years has made it pretty much impossible for you to buy its editing software unless you’re willing to pay a subscription fee (thanks a lot), conducted an internal survey and discovered that employees were spending up to five hours a day just reading, answering and sorting emails. The bosses panicked: how could anyone be productive? But the technology that’s been around for over half a century can do just that: bring together what needs to be brought together, both humanly and musically. In creative conversation.
For a year, multi-instrumentalist Tim Koh and sound designer Sun An sent sound clips to each other’s inboxes, collaborating remotely to create 18 scratchy, evocative ambient sketches. The intriguing melodic fragments seem to disappear just when you think you’ve got them. A little blip here, a drop of water there. There are layers of carefully stacked and intertwined instruments, some barely recognisable as such. Computer sounds and field recordings scrape slowly through forgotten machines in slow motion, and tracks like »Somewhere In Time« or »Can’t Stand In The Past« feel like accidentally intercepted sounds from the pirate radio stations of abandoned ghost towns. We’re lucky to be listening to this conversation on »Salt And Sugar Look The Same«.
