Tim Olive sent us his Dominion Mills (845 AUDIO 845-4) in July 2014, with a hand-written note describing it as “some summer music”, and at one level it does indeed seem slightly more relaxed and open-ended than some other collaborations we’ve heard from Olive, which isn’t to say that 100 holiday-makers will be packing it on their iPods for a trip to Montego Bay. He’s working this time with Anne-François Jacques, the splendid lady from Montreal who runs the Crustacés Tapes label, whose claws we have already encountered in 2014 with a couple of exciting items of marginal sound-art. On this release, she’s simply playing amplified electronic motors, to create a hypnotic rotary effect that’s very pleasing and not unlike an electronicified version of Ferran Fages with his rotating surfaces and broken turntables. Olive is credited with playing “magnetic pickups”, part of his single-string electric guitar setup. Together, these two players produce an enjoyable 30 minutes of process-based music that somehow contains far more content than it reasonably should under the circumstances. It’s not restless, bitty, music, and instead offers a soothing sun-drenched textured drone, while at the same time refusing much in the way of conventional musical sense; it’s more in the area of exploratory sound art than free improvisation. Anne-François also did the cover design which could be read as a graphic of a rotating motor, or the rays of the sun.
