This three-CD set from The Keraunograph Organisation in Montreal reminds me that I have at least two vinyl box sets from the same agency sent to me in recent years, which I have not yet dared to release from their hand-made boxes that creak and crow as if they were dipped in caked blood.
This might be the work of James Hamilton, who sent us the APEIROZOAN release in 2022, preceded by the monumental Xenolith in 2017; both lengthy drone-noise works of testing minimalist forms, created by processing recordings of the Hammond organ into near-infinite tunnels of sound. The packaging, especially of the APEIROZOAN record, was highly cryptical and esoteric in nature, and I see much the same strategy in evidence today. Hamilton has gone overboard on backwards-printed letters and reversed words, and grid-system justified typography, plus picking out selected letters in red, to the extent that it’s not even clear what to call this record. I’ll settle for COMAOCEAN (Kg.IX),which instantly suggests this is music so ethereal that it actually does the job of a two-gallon bottle of ether, knocking the listener into a coma that lasts about three months, while simultaneously setting us adrift in an imaginary ocean that’s three times as wide as the Sargasso Sea.
Almost three hours of mysterious, hermetic drone awaits the listener brave enough to purchase this very extreme example of process-minimalism. The creator makes almost no connection to formal experiments in minimal composition of the 20th century, not deigning to name-check a single predecessor or influence, and seems to content to occupy a mystical sealed-off world of his own creation. You’ll be swept from barely-perceptible gas-hissing moments to insufferably airless and formless roaring blocks at high volume – but when I say “swept”, that implies there will be some sense of rapid forward movement, and the one thing we have to learn when faced with this inscrutable music is that it takes a very long time to unfold its secrets, if indeed the secrets are even attainable. There’s no doubt that the creator has spent a good deal of deliberation in the creation of this music, and indeed in the careful selection of track titles and the way they’re set out in the booklet like a Latin inscription on a marble slab, but such clues as we are given are spartan and few.
“I feel like I had very little conscious choice in what it became”, states Hamilton in his enclosed letter, admitting that he appears torn between exercising total control over his work and surrendering to some unknown cosmic forces that guide his hand on the gouvernail of his antique sailing ship – a ship which is also equipped with gold-plated armour of invisibility, signal flags that are nothing but blank fields so the enemy won’t detect its presence, and is propelled on silent oars pulled by a ghostly crew of doomed phantoms. (21/03/2024)