Artists/creators mining that grey area between "soundscape" and "drone" have produced some remarkably satisfying music over the last clutch of years, and it's an area that is (thankfully) limitless in its apparent scope. That old saw surely applies: it's not the instrument that becomes the great enabler, only the imagination.
Sound sculptors Murray and Nehil are both old hands plowing this furrow, and throughout an increasingly busy and vibrant network. Their work is scattered across a swathe of labels and affiliations (Alluvial, Intransitive, Cut, Erewhon, Edition, etc.) whose objective is to further the investigation into the aegis of pure sound, and of dynamic sonic progression. Restless spirits both, Sillage finds the duo maxing out their idiosyncrasies utilizing sounds co-opted from a number of different performances and festivals, most notably Boston's Intransitive event.
What remains then of the actual recorded document? Sounds, neé instances, that are unidentifiable, perplexing, naggingly off - this is what we mean by mystery. The disc itself barely runs three-quarters of an hour, but its economy is certainly time well spent. As "Ebb/cess" commences, the feeling is of something gradually assuming necrotic proportions, buzz/hiss/flutter/siren harmonics that just as well mimic all the oxygen suddenly escaping from a tanker's decompressed hull, until just as it crescendos it subsides, morphing in to the sturm und clang of "Runs Toward Needles." Elsewhere, the calculus of silence, abstract but tangible, is interrupted by industrial gust ("Underneath a Portrait") and caressed by calmer breezes purring across the tops of both lap and foliage ("Feet Wrap Around Chair"). Murray and Nehil are eager to dispel any preconceived expectations to what may be tacitly obvious, to force you to listen where sounds should not be, have never been, and don't seem possible. Yet, there they are, in all their molecular glory.
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