Fill out the form below to receive the latest news about upcoming LINE editions and projects.

TOMAS PHILLIPS

Limit_Fold

LINE is happy to have artist Tomas Phillips return for his second LINE release since 2006’s haunting composition Intermission / Six Feuilles (LINE_029).

Limit_Fold extends Tomas Phillips’s aesthetic of minimal through-composition that seeks a balance between electronic and acoustic sound sources and foregrounds active listening. Sparse koto notes and melodies interact with low end drones, digital, staccato flares, and abrupt string swells in a single 40 minute piece in which relative silence is given form. As in his previous work, central to the music’s ethos is the further juxtaposition of organic, meditative warmth and the immediacy of tension arising from small incursions into an otherwise soft, sonic palate; such tension that might be indicative of the sharper edges of interiority. The title draws inspiration from Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s essay “L’urgence et la patience” about the two ostensibly discordant but overlapping components of writing, or composing: the urgency to push against limits of time and capacity, and the patience that folds gently over on itself to bring a text to fruition.

Bandcamp Apple Music TIDAL Reviews
Catalog:
LINE_076
Format:
Digital
Edition:
open edition
Release:
February 2016
Tracklist:
  1. Limit_Fold (40:05)

Mastered by J. Winston Phillips
Cover photo by Richard di Santo

TOMAS PHILLIPS (b. 1969) is a composer, writer, and teacher whose sound work focuses on improvisational performance and minimalist through-composition.

He began composing electronic music in the early 1990s and has since created works for installations, dance, and theatre performances, along with many solo and collaborative releases on such labels as Line, Trente Oiseaux, and Atak.

He has taught in the disciplines of literature and the fine arts at various universities in Europe and North America and currently teaches comparative literature in the US. He is the author of scholarly monographs on minimalism and liminality, along with three novels and two story collections.

tphillips.net

REVIEWS OF
Limit_Fold

  • Headphone Commute’s Best of 2016 : Music For Bending Light And Stopping Time

  • Limit_Fold is loaded with promise. Each sound is a probe pointing outward, patiently beckoning the arrival of the new. I’m made to listen intently for the signs of materialisation; the nascent indications of an emergent sound as it climbs out of the crumple of walkie-talkie dead air or sprouts from the soft hum of low frequencies. More often than not, Phillips simply compounds the expectant unease instead of relieving it. Acts of tension bloom into yet further acts of tension, with hollow and peripheral noises (drafts slinking through open windows, voices reduced to the inaudible breaths of ghosts, the rustle of handled objects) writhing and churning across the walls of stereo space. At some points, Limit_Fold reduces toward absolute silence, leaving me clinging to the dim emission of a single sine wave or hollow gush of air, nurturing imminent death like a candle about to go out.

    Given that the vast proportion of Limit_Fold works with pale shades and slow fades, the moments of sudden musicality seem miraculous. Doors swing open to reveal dissonant orchestras or meditative droplets of koto, ripping through the air of cross-fading allusion and strange obfuscation. Having re-calibrated my listening to the music’s otherwise gentle pacing, the sparing use of staccato and sudden event appears surreally bright and crisp; I realise that Phillips has drawn me deep into his language of monochrome implication and micro-detail, and that in my constant state of baited expectation, I’ve actually entered a heightened engagement with the present tense.
    (attnmagazine.co.uk)

  • Frequentemente, con riconoscimento, l’opera dell’uomo si è integrata fondendosi con gli elementi naturali in un’unità organica. Quando la morfologia di queste opere assume dei caratteri che portano alla luce ciò che viene richiamato alla mente, in ambito musicale, ci troviamo davanti ad opere come quella di Thomas Phillips.

    Limit_Fold è l’ultimo lavoro del compositore americano e teorico di letteratura comparata alla North Carolina State University, che questa volta vede realizzare il proprio lavoro dall’etichetta di Los Angeles, Line imprint.  A sedici anni dalla sua ideazione, l’etichetta rimane incline al minimalismo contemporaneo, curato per la prima volta da Richard Chartier nel 2000. Negli anni a seguire le preziose pubblicazioni hanno creato un sostanzioso portfolio di opere tendenti alla sfere multimediali e visive, ripercorrendo un’estetica minimalista dai caratteri gentili. Richard Chartier, ideatore ma anche sostenitore diretto di Line imprint, a settembre degli anni duemila, sperimenta con il suo album “Series”, la buona integrazione tra diverse arti, percependo e riportando l’animo dei posti e degli oggetti, in essi contenuto.

    Limit_Fold è una raccolta di 40 minuti, in formato digitale, in cui sorgenti sonore ed acustiche sono accompagnate da strutture melodiche che emergono dalle continue e lente dissolvenze. L’album è portatore, nella sua estetica, della presenza del tempo come indagine, argomento dal quale scaturiscono sensazioni riconducibili al tendere oltre un limite e ad un particolare stato di attesa. Thomas Phillips, dedica particolare attenzione alle sensazioni, intese come delle semplici percezioni date da frequenze del suono e tradotte attraverso un linguaggio abituato a dialogare con spazi considerando luce, materia e peso. Una manipolazione e trasformazione affidate ad un senso compositivo appartenente al periodo corrente, che non pare cedere ad un’idolatria dell’effetto. La masterizzazione è stata realizzata da Winston Phillips, la fotografia da Richard di Santo.

    La configurazione finale di questo lavoro è il risultato di progressive trasformazioni, di spesse sinergie che esprimono il loro tempo, testimoniato dalle scelte di realizzazione, in maniera coerente senza scomodare troppo l’inquietudine.
    (electronique.it)