David Lee Myers has been working on his research project for nearly half a century. In that time, he has created hymns to undiscovered galaxies while improving our ability to decode matrices of outlandish frequencies. He is a stalwart of electroacoustic abstractionism, his original brand of feedback-derived sound art born from intricately connected mixing boards minus the use of instruments. Under his own name, or the renowned Arcane Device alias, Myers has developed a consistent output that has provided us with a fair share of extraordinary moments.
After the earlier period, defined by awesome solitary trips and equally brilliant collaborations with names such as Tod Dockstader, Asmus Tietchens, Thomas Dimuzio and Gen Ken Montgomery, Myers has in more recent times expanded his scanning of the universal vibration, seeking to combine typically unconventional concepts with shapes and sonic sources that — depending on the listener's disposition — may be better grasped without losing an ounce of their depth.
Accordingly, the music of Intervals / Interludes does contain slightly more pronounced harmonic and rhythmic cues, occasional indications of human presence (although morphed by processing), and, in any case, a number of orientation signals that the audience can turn to in order to prevent feeling adrift in an ocean of oscillations. The latter is a sensation this reviewer adores, but which many other beings — who are perpetually trying to locate a "still point" or a "beginning" to something that, in fact, has existed forever — often find terrifying, a genuine threat to their mental safety.
Any attempt to describe a "style" will ultimately fail. From release to release, and even inside the same album, Myers flips the script between tracks. The audio image shifts across the eight segments in a myriad of ways, diverting our focus from one area of the hologram that contains us to another. Despite the rapid picture changes, the program's conceptual stability holds steady throughout. This stimulation of consciousness renders a hypothetical sense of harmonious living momentarily reachable. And it is already known that our psychosomatic sensors will reshuffle all of these elements on subsequent listens.
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