Something Éric La Casa mentions twice in his short program note for Everyday Unknown 4 & 5 is infraliminary, a word used synonymously with invisible — yet just enough of something to not be nothing. A search for that six-syllable term lands on journal articles that discuss the makeup of an Xray, historical experimentation to determine the nature of periphery "infraliminary elements" and otherwise hazy spots "produced by the summation of shadows of infraliminary elements," etc. Further complications: "When an accumulation of many small similar details is found in an object, apparently the roentgenogram only shows part of them." You can see why this phenomena might intrigue someone — thirty years into a career — attempting to infuse their sound source to specks of dust...
Coming off a globe-sized project of largely literal ambient recordings with his and Philip Samartzis's 2020 Captured Space, La Casa returns to his microscope and magnifies until reaching "beyond the threshold of my hearing...in these territories of the inaudible" while also looking at the relationship of the body to listening (versus what a microphone hears) for Everyday Unknown 4 & 5.
In line with this act of using such a miniscule ink well, you would expect the results to be less active than La Casa's explorations of air ducts, room ambiences and so on. Not so. A gust of wind, a fax machine, ungrounded speaker wire, a seemingly large fly, pinhole drones, round bassy clouds, CB clicks with someone muttering on the other end, and other bits sputter and jump or sing at the ranges of human hearing. La Casa pivots frequently between relatively disparate colors and blocks of sound, chopping instead of coalescing to enhance internal dissonance.
However, the album's interest lies in La Casa's ability to digitize the analog and repurpose it into sprawling android worlds. While the aforementioned interdependent minutia occupies the listener's attention, the artist gradually introduces a hissing, peppered-with-insects soundscape that, upon closer inspection, is perhaps a simulation crafted from a sophisticated amplification of hard drives motors, ant hills and squeaky pipes acting as birds. Versions of this happen throughout; some are stifling (hot air balloon burners popping off in your ear during a hurricane, wandering in a building stairwell), some enchanting (rocking chair on a porch), but all are delicate, intriguing and realized with aplomb.
It's fashionable now — not just among people who dress in black and staple Christian Death patches to their jackets — to discuss and plan a survival strategy for the End of The World. I frequently wonder what I will do for music (listening to / performing) if the juice runs out. Everyday Unknown 4 & 5 is a worthy answer, as it echoes the following Cage thoughts: "Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music." They might be undiscovered and/or hiding in plain sight, but La Casa is going to find them.
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