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Gears of Sand was founded in 2001 by Delaware-dweller Ben Fleury-Steiner, flavours of Cage, Young, Inoue, et al. enriching his musical inquiry. By 2004, GoS had become the hub of a net-mediated community of artists of the Ambient Drone-zone and Space-ways. It had also lost the trappings of higher mission, becoming a more functional vehicle for promulgation of work Ben admired. Introduction to the output-heavy approach of Aidan Baker (GoS releases: Pendulum, Green & Cold) convinced the GoS boss a prolific release-rate didn't preclude quality control, resulting in enhanced productivity and diversity. A look at the '08 state of the GOS art follows.
 First up come Con_Sense, two name artists (believed to be Thomas Weiss and Mathias Grassow) going nameless in protest against authorial genre-driven imperatives; point being that artists tend to situate themselves too readily in a specific genre straitjacket. Their aim is to float free between various stylings, to spring something new out of hybridisation, bidding listeners open minds to other styles they may have been closed to. Truth be told, Compass evidences no great innovation, but is a fresh and wild enough package of high resolution atmospheric ambient with occasional beats, fusing something of neue Berlin (cf. Monolake) with traces from alte Berlin school (founder: K. Schulze). From the sinewy slither of “Threshold”, with its dense thrumming undergrowth and compressed sound-curtain threaded with zither-y motifs, to the sputtering sequences of “Starry Sky,” it blazes its genrecidal trail. In between “Tarika” ups the beat ante with a mechanical clank-throb over the wellings of ghostly vocals, while ululations and roiling percussive atmospheres animate “Gathering From Step Beyond.” Best of all is the hypnotic “La-U-Tir”, a teeming mélange of bit-crush and beat-push.
 Next Hinsidan, a Danish pair with a sound from underground, whose Bleach Dye Yr Heart taps into a gruzzy post-industrialism with odd beat-interludes. Traces of German darkdrone-mongers, Troum in their ominous treated guitar tones, but otherwise sui generis. Power electronicist, Superjus, bounces off Atish Pare, wielder of everything from guitars to enhanced Buddha Machine. Starter, "Slaughter of the Innocence, Slaughter of the Innocent", hosts a sinister short-looped throbbing pulse and unsettling atmospheres, which prevails well into the set's mains. Eventually “Traders of Optimism” allows a faint accession of light and warmth via drops of angelic ambience. Along the way, "Vivisection of the Soul" requires a discomfiting squat in a wind tunnel buffeted by the noxious blow-by of massive movements of polluted air. The subsequent "I Hear you, but I don't Think you're Sorry" relents only in replacing it with a stretch of bent corroded guitar-wrangling that reaches vanishing point in whiteout and rumble. The unsalubrious dinning of tarnished metals yields to relatively verdant passages, here recalling the ambiguous drift of Eno, there the ritual psycho-ambience of Coil.
 Yui Onodera, Tokyo composer and instrumentalist, creates multi-layered immersion zones with electro-acoustics and field recordings, combined with guitar, piano, and treated voice. Rhizome, already release #10, finds Onodera aligned with the microsound-meets-electronica tradition of fellow-Japanese Spekk and Plop labels, and the likes of US kindred, Dragon’s Eye and Apestaartje. A rhizome being the epicenter for the plant's roots and stems, it stands as a fitting semiotic for this work: its 7 parts draw the listener into its subtle yet sprawling sonic tendrils, a filigree of sonic means spun into tightly-wound aesthetic ends. As compared with contemporaneous and/OAR release, Suisei, Rhizome shows a more accessible Onodera - oneiromancer of captured piano tinkle and guitar pluck, dissolved in light loop liquids of pitched materials and environment traces. Residual eddies orbit about particulate fizz, to the crunch of neutrons amplified, resonantly fluting and fluttering across microbial expanses, unfolding from within. “I collect the small sounds no one notices”, says Onodera, and engrossing miniatures like "Rhizome 7" incite to view his collection.
 Danes Danny Kreutzfeldt and Mads Weitling are Rumforskning (tr. Space exploration). Driven by fascination with outer space as guiding metaphor for their uncompromising atmospherics, Himmelhvælv, one long-format exploration, might be a set of messages from a sub-atomic world viewed in a cloud-chamber of elementary particles - a nano-balletics of collision, release and absorption of minute bursts of energy. No truck is had with science or religion in portrayal of an unheimlich, abstract and formless entity. So, though space is the place for the Dane twain, it's no show of Apollo-like flow, more a miasma of cosmic radiation, space dust, black holes and dark matter. From wheezing whisper to resonant roar goes "Himmelvælv", a foot in ambient space, another in glitch/microsound, signal pedal sometimes pressed to noise metal. Expansive crepitating atmospherics takes on cosmic proportions. Chilly atonal synth resonances and greyscale melodics host a welter of static, pulsations and clickings. Drone cedes to buzz to rumble, drift'n'pulse to soft white noise backdrop in a protracted sublit audio-morphology.
 True Colour Of Blood is US axescapist Eric Kesner, and All of the True Things I’m about to Tell you are Lies is ten episodes of dark-light ambient drone wrought from guitar, via mixer and manipulation. Kesner asserts the purity and primacy of guitar in the face of the omnipotence of synthesis, and his audio research is suited to prodding at the peripheries of its envelope. An inky ooze runs through it, from opener “Upon These Shores” - a creeping gothic twin to Stars of the Lid’s American pastoral. Extreme stasis abounds, notably on “Of” and "Somnifer", each being 16+-min. stretches of misty tone-melt lying over loop-pools at the edges of soundfields where minimal turns liminal. The sullen languour of “Defy” slides in, distended timbres of brushed metals, the odd note wriggling free from cold-pressed tone-clusters, without resolving its torpid tension. “Illegally Jailed for Applauding the Violent Death of a World Leader” buries a sub-pulse above which wisps of sustain lick out wreathed in bleary reverb, all distant Maeror Tri and discoloured Chalk. Then there's the amplified yawn of “A Man Alone is Simply God”, barely there as pitched matter, all spent wind and billows. The euphonic harmonics of “Sisyphus” comes late, balm for ears arid from austere attenuation.
 Christopher McFall is a sonicist whose work is wrought from processed field recordings, moved by “the desire to manipulate/engineer recorded aspects of the macroscopic world around him into a microscopic mosaic.” Solemn Words For A Fabled Apparatus is the fruits of (presumably) therapeutically questing city-wanderings undertaken while McFall was dealing with “a series of abrupt transitions” in his life. No epiphany ensued, but Solemn Words... serves to document suspended memories of distracted drift. McFall's hope is that it should stand as a sort of urban reverie, transcending status as merely obscure scenes where machines, footsteps, aircraft and clatter blend in a cloud of unmindfulness. Treatment is “scientifically natural” rather than digi-crushed, filtering out shades or enhancing pulses to alter the sonographies of otherwise drab events. Musical dispositions are drawn out from within the diurnal hum-drum, as if divining psycho-activity for the inert soul. McFall proposes music at the threshold of presence, spontaneous sounds falling in aleatory innocence, the merest interventive tweak coaxing into fresh configurations, by turns poignant and hauntological. Intelligent design is most peceptible on "3", whose air is replete with noxious ambient gas hiss and ominous thrum.
 Jeremy Bible & Jason Henry harness an array of electro-acoustics in forging Vryashn, a work of great depth and subtle eloquence. JB&JH propose a theme of the sensation of a dream within a dream; of being surrounded by snow, becoming numb and falling asleep only to awake in the rain in another dream and location. Various phases of such an experience are depicted, from elated to disorientated. Various sound sources - piano, water line pipes, wine glasses, rain on a window, and a garage lamp - articulate Vryashn's variations; a two-part immersion zone of fragmentation and re-moulding that shuns the delicacy of a Budd bath for riskier reefs towards Andrew Liles' The Dying Submariner and Aloof Proof's Piano Text. JB&JH curate a descent into a drowned world of wrecked and wracked elegiacs, attended by envelopes of trills pushed into spills, redrawn revenants distended in a quest for new euphony. The duo’s design is to pique to poke in textural caverns and inlets of accidental harmonics. They achieve this, "Vrashyn I" exemplifying the warmth and spacious movements of their reverberant Satie dissolution - a fine exhibit of well-treated piano.
 So, with no explicit agenda other than to mine the sounds he likes for the like-minded, these releases, and the forthcoming Machina Mundi from Iceland's Gydja and Suchness 3 by Germany's Seconds in Fomaldehyde, see GoS approaching the figure forty with a vibrantly multi-nation roster. Bestriding a webbed'n'wired world of dissolved boundaries, Ben Fleury-Steiner has envisioned GoS as “an ever-growing community of artists who are forging sonic community through the pure sounds of their craft indefinitely,” and this profile shows it to be a vision well realised.
Review by Alan Lockett
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