In his liner notes to this release, Wade Matthews offers a brief history of freely improvised music, especially as it relates to ideas in the visual arts, eventually centering on the notion of parallax, "the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer.", relating this both to musician and listener and the numerous angles from which one can both create and appreciate this are of music.
Well put if not entirely novel but the more immediate question is: does the music at hand have the richness and complex naturalness to afford such views and maintain interest? By and large, happily, yes. Chrysakis (laptop, electronics), Matthews (digital synthesis, field recordings) and Bernal-Villegas (percussion) construct six pieces that tingle the ears and convincingly render a fairly unique sonic world. The percussion really glues things together, Bernal-Villegas wielding a vast but generally light palette, usually forming a pervasive but subtle base through which the electronicists weave sparse but liquid patterns, recorded sounds seeming artificial and synthesized ones natural, sometimes pastoral with a dark edge, on other occasions cheerily industrial. It meanders here and there, yes, and sometimes gets a bit loopy and bloopy, but by disc's end, the trio has established itself as a moving, breathing force in space and when they let off a bit of steam in the final cut, when the control is willfully eased, it feels earned, the rattles, wheezes, foghorns and other detritus coalescing into one quite satisfying mass. Nice work.
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