Sound artist Thanos Chrysakis builds a sonic nexus not in view of sending keening tones shooting through the stratosphere, subtly shrugging off their immediate influences and acquiring an intangible, diffuse, atomised quality. A Scar in the Air, as a continuation of his inscape series, which strives to bring out and accentuate the timbral affinities of the source sounds in question, instead shows no small interest in a system of myriad relations and the sympathy and antipathy that hold between them. Consider it, then, a myriad-faceted polyhedron: as it gyrates before your ears, different aspects flash into focus.
The main appeal, however, lies in how Chrysakis turns this process into one of emanation. Rarely can something so painstakingly assembled sound so fluid. A distinct, disciplined sense for composition emerges from each of these works. And yet, at the same time, its fruit is a music that stands as a dynamically linked succession of events, which expand and contract, systole and diastole, with slow, ectoplasmic motions.
As a system, though, it doesn't push toward equilibrium, but toward its own outer parameters. A certain rockpool mysteriousness is thus maintained, the sonic microcosms gauging a hole in the fabric and confirming that strangeness and enchantment are still part of the picture. Inasmuch as the pieces display formal integrity, they are also effervescent, forceful, fiercely idiosyncratic and beautifully damaged, gobbling up every accidental influence that falls into their path. "Inscape 27" sees crystalline edges undergo a gradual yet significant metamorphosis into mouldy, indistinct forms, while, similarly, the full-spectrum harmonics and irregular pulses of "Inscape 24" evoke the rush of the bloodstream and the firing of synapses via a diverse palette. At its mid-point, though, it is cut right open, the delicate pulses and pings scattering like flocks of birds. The album demonstrates real passion for sonic viscera, making this bit of sonic scarring a strangely pleasurable, not to mention engaging, experience.
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