Thomas DeLio is an American composer based in Washington DC. He also happens to be a respected music theorist, and has been active in both fields for many years; the earliest date for a composition I can find is 1972. Transparent Waves (NEUMA RECORDS NEUMA 153) is the fourth collection which Neuma have put together surveying his work, and it covers the period 1995 to 2001. “Be advised that this album is replete with … silences and brief sound events,” states the press release. They’re not kidding. Over 67 mins of playing time, only a few very minimal sounds will reach your ears. On this collection, DeLio does it through a variety of approaches; collaborating with conventional musicians in small ensembles; field recordings (I assume, from the Tangier and India sets); and the experimental poetry of P. Inman, the latter of which is showcased on the long opening cut ‘and of “of”’.
TSP is no stranger to lower-case and ultra-minimal works, and we’ve enjoyed many releases on the winds measure recordings label, and more recently the very testing works of Bruno Duplant. Yet DeLio’s experiments strike me as very stiff, too formalised. The underlying pattern is an attempt to use long tracts of silence to frame one particular very short sound; through this drip-feed process, one which also allows a certain amount of severe cut-offs and sudden edits, he seeks to allow us to experience sound in a new, clean way. (Stockhausen put himself through a similar regime when he conducted his Klavierstucke project.) No denying he is very serious about this, and his intellectual rigour is not to be questioned, but aesthetically it feels under-nourished, almost empty. It’s as if he’s simply proving a conceptual point about music and sound by drawing a diagram; a diagram that exists in time. Matter of fact, it feels like he’s making the exact same narrow point, simply repeated time and again. The droplets of sound, when they arrive, are unmemorable, lacking in beauty, and devoid of any meaning.
The record somehow failed to enlighten this listener, and I did not experience the hoped-for revelation. Not recommended. (07/01/2022)