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Resonant Embers - Various | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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 A retinue of respected sound artists sit in a seditious huddle on Resonant Embers. The symbols of alterity they throw up ensure a continuous movement, but it's one that will annoy if your searching for grand gestures and conciliatory attitudes. This disc is more a matter of plentiful rustling, a series of discontinuous clunks, warbles, and gurgling irreducible to an identity, meaning, or any sort of fixed difference as such. Works meander and are engagingly minor; fragments and instances rather than products. "Whickering mechanical parapropalaeholophorus" has a boozy lurch with a spirit of unsustainable rapture, abjection, and trance. The piece is like looking through grit-blasted glass; inside one sees the penchant of irr. apt. (ext.) for polluted, post-Industrial textures, excessive but precise, as they demur before corrosive metallic incursions and swooping levels of dense distortion. Over the course of the album, relationships shift on a frequent basis, points occur when there is concord in discord, before the behemoth shoots off into another phase. Certain tracks present a series of rising challenges: among them, Maile Colbert summons a vague fulguration, a bluish shot with rose, encapsulating expansive yearning and unresolved tension with the briefest of melodic strokes. Its chorus of singing electrons and multiplying resonant shimmers reach out to and suggest the arch of the sky like a majestic ceiling above them, while at the same time providing a fine foil for awakening ancestral voices. In this same manner, Andrew Liles coaxes together a surprisingly spare piece, as a breathy violin passage curls through ominous, tolling arpeggios and delicate metallic ricochets. Taking the opposite approach, others such as Jgrzinich opt to push one back into a corner. These pieces gibber at the edges of the known, sometimes sounding electronic, at other points like garbled constructions of nature. Both moves prove successful - each accommodates and subverts subliminal inter-communication in equal measure, as these artists chase a mood that recedes into the distance just as they start to catch it. Review by Max Schaefer
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