Jonathan Deasy
Le Sacre
POLAND SUBLIME RETREAT SR021 CD (2024)
Single hour-long drone piece from this Cork creator who has previously appeared as Knowing, Quiet Clapping, and Noh. He turned up on the A-side of the Parasomnias cassette from the Bivalve micro-label.
For today’s record he demonstrates fluency and prowess on the SuperCollider software, an instrument about which I know very little, but I assume it’s a powerful sound-sculpting tool available to those with a sufficiently powerful Apple Mac on their desk. Into the maw of this insatiable beast, known as “The Giraffe” in computing circles, he fed sine waves and “slowly oscillating waveforms”, sonic events which, to me, are as evanescent as 18 butterflies in winter or soap bubbles in an Edwardian parlour. I’m encouraged to note that he intends the entire work to function in a “deep listening” context, a phrase which we haven’t heard so much lately, although when Pauline Oliveros was alive it was an important part of musical currency. In her case, it was linked to a holistic sense of mind and body integration, leading to increased spiritual powers and inner peace, and passing on thereby a sense of empathy and compassion with all of nature and humankind. Spend an hour in the company of this record and you’ll soon see that Deasy is very much aligned with all of these beneficent themes and forces, and with his quasi-religious title, might have earned himself a place in the orbit of the great minimalist, Eliane Radigue.
The hazy cover art is by Rutger Zuydervelt, perhaps evoking an idyllic desert landscape suitable for holy meditations and hermetic contemplation, in the manner of any given Old Testament saint.(15/11/2024)