Stefan Goldmann continues to create his very precisely calibrated experiments in electronic sound. I suppose by this I mean that each project arrives with a very definite scope, and often has a particular point or statement that he wishes to register in the minds of the audience.
Scale And Scope (EDITION KYMATA EK002) might be saying something about digital artefacts when creating music in the computer, or about the decay and degradation of flexi-discs; it’s been released as four separate flexidisc records in a box, and each record contains a different audio experience. I’m not clear how he arrived at the source sound, but he calls it an “individual microtonal designer scale”, and he distinguishes them by using Greek characters – Series Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta, implying that further progressions through the alphabet are planned. The process that’s important to him has been to inscribe the sounds on flexidiscs, because he likes the way that medium is so imperfect, and generates crackles and clicks and other undesirable glitches. He hopes that each pressing is unique, so no two copies in the edition will be exactly alike – the pops and clonks appearing at different times on the records; even the set itself is packaged like an art object, perhaps a folder full of screenprints.
Individual sounds are quite nice, but this feels like a rather pointless and self-referential piece of process art, where the value of the experiment is negligible and the finished product is a cul-de-sac for the imagination. A self-describing statement about the nature of recording and manufacture. (16/10/2024)