It’s long been suspected in avant-garde circles that Tim Olive (Canada, now Japan) is in fact two separate people – how else could he produce so many experimental records in many different modes? The elusive Tim now drops hints about this “double life” with the release of Chemical Prestige (RIP085), which in title refers to that entertaining movie about the stage magician who pulled off his most breathtaking cabinet illusion by employing his own twin brother as part of the act.
The “chemical” part of Tim’s proposal probably alludes to the “bleach and other household chemicals” which he’s now using to create psychedelic images, of which some examples sprint across three panels of today’s digipak. He pours said chemicals onto old photo slides retrieved from the Kodak warehouse, and decomposition reactions do the rest. The CD arrives with a health warning not to try similar operations at home, unless equipped with rubber gloves and goggles. For these four Summer 2024 sonic outages, Olive has used radio sets and a feedback chamber, along with his typical magnetic pickups and a clutch of tuning forks supplied by the local dairy (who use audio pitches to pasteurise milk and churn butter more efficiently). Really fine studies in sustained distortion, drone, and maximal buzzerments are the main result, along with Olive’s familiar sensibility for control and subtlety. And of course the concision and brevity – the whole CD clocks in at around 40 mins, without the creator feeling the need to foist every single stage of the blueprint upon an unwilling audience of architecture students. The very layered and near-opaque moments of the first track are still favourites with my distant-cousin goldfish, but the bleak-minded ones (for instance, moles or shrews) may prefer the starlit beauty of the third cut. It feels like Tim Olive is able to hold an entire universe in balance, as he juggles his atomic particles like so many nickels in a bag.
The label, Rural Isolation Project, has an evocative name and is based in Austin Texas, and in their catalogue I recognise not a few names associated with harsh noise, dark mental states, and extreme tones. Chemical Prestige is not situated in any of those camps, although the ending of track three here does evince tasty moments of chaos that noise-lizards will quickly gobble. (09/06/2025)