Five download-only digital items from Room40; it’s not our policy to review digital downloads, so very brief notes.
David Shea is the American player who we used to enjoy for his sampler-based collision-edit works such as Shock Corridor and Prisoner. But that was in the 1990s, and I haven’t kept up. The Ship (DRM4186) has to do with a software project by Tom Crago, developer of computer games, and is Shea’s soundtrack for a “virtual ship” experience, that, much like a game, involves collecting objects and trying to reach a destination. Quite lush sound design by Shea, with lotsa atmosphere.
Fugal States (DRM4161) by American composer Ben Glas emerges as an intricate puzzle of layers – tones within tones, melodies transposed to other registers, arranged in an elaborate structure which may, for all its digital-ness and modernism, actually refer back to the fugue form in classical music. Glas hopes that we’ll spin this album in the background and let it seep into our daily routine, inducing something like a trance state. One admires the ingenuity of his construction, but I found the music insufferably twee.
Bodies (RM4228), by the Australian composer Madeleine Cocolas, may have started life with field recordings of water (oceans, to be specific), but Cocolas wishes to make a more general statement about the human body, and hence draws no distinctions between the physicality of the human race and the vastness of the oceans that surround us. Besides the watery recordings, there’s also voice recordings, synths, and electronics; in her composition, she sets out to blur lines wherever possible, the better to advance her thesis. We are referred to her 2022 album Spectral, of which this release is reckoned to be a continuation. I suspect there’s some real compassion for the human predicament informing her work.
Ogive is the duo of Chris Herbert and Elias Merino, from the UK and Spain respectively. Previously (on Folds) they’ve worked with computers and synths; they like to think their collaboration as a kind of “collage” of their different working methods, which may be in evidence on today’s Opalescentia (DRM4159); one of the pair is methodical, the other prefers spontaneity. In their notes, they feel they’ve managed to surprise each other as they work through their creative tensions, while evolving what they regard as “virtual weather systems” and “volatile sonic microstructures” in their music. But no surprises for the listener in this dull, over-processed electronica and pointless self-indulgent doodling.
German sax player Ulrich Krieger, now living in California, has produced a mighty blast or two in his time; we enjoyed /RAW:ReSpace/ for XI Records, from 2016. Here he’s joined by three players on bass flute, accordion and contrabass to produce Aphotic II: Bathyal (DRM4128). Like Madeleine Cocolas above, Krieger’s work has an “oceanic” theme, but it’s based on a detailed knowledge about the deepest parts of the ocean, how light works in this abyssal zone, and what marine life may dwell there. Krieger is a scuba diver and has some experience of it, but he’s alluding to lots of unknowns and unknowables, constantly emphasising the terrifying darkness in his notes; light simply cannot penetrate this deep. “It is the closest to an alien environment…we will find here on planet Earth,” is his conclusion. The swirling, ominous, lower-register sounds on this album are suitably disconcerting, each long part of the suite growing ever more menacing as we sink further beneath the ocean surface.
All the above from 02/02/2024.