If the label 12k is already concerned with microsounds, its offshoot, LINE, straddles the threshold of invisibility. Virtual recorings of imagined spaces are made at a volume so low that unless you turn the sound right up you’ll hear nothing. What follows is hard to describe – the barest whisper of a whirr, the thinnest hiss. The idea that the noise is so liminal that the act of listening creates a track out of the background noises in your own enviroment. The drone of my laptop was immeasurably louder than the loops, and i started to hear the ghost of a neighbor’s radio through the walls. All the sounds stem from malfunction in the digital recording equipment, a by now familiar method in this particular slipstream of minimalist music. The stated aim, though. is “to dissolve the past ad future into one eternal present” by negating the sense of linearity in the loops. Suprisingly the sounds themselves aren’t pure, but complex and gritty in their own diaphanous way. So much so, that it’s difficult to hear a loop in them at all, just the tiniest specks of sound unfolding in their micro-complexity.
(the wire, uk)
Minimalism to the max! Are immedia’s soundspaces vast or miniscule? They could be the sonic twinkling of a million distant stars, or the fizzling quarks of a dying atom… or a microphone about three feet away from a bowl of Rice Crispies¨ for that matter… 2/1 (in keeping with Line’s philosphy) explores the ultimate boundaries of listening by way of computerized sound renderings at ear-testingly low volumes. Tracks one through ten (all between 3:01 and 3:09) comprise virtual recordings of imagined spaces; compare them to the faint electric hum of some faraway (idle, but plugged-in) appliance, the invisible flow of air through darkened ductwork or the practically-inaudible galaxies between seconds… each track is extremely quiet. As the liner notes suggest, “Appreciation of the essential qualities of this sound matter requires pure, unbiased listening, and a shift in focus of our attention and understanding from representation to being”… I’d add to that, “Appreciation requires a very noiseless listening environment”… the hum of the heater in my basement and passing cars override these delicate audiosystems despite my (admittedly consumer-level) headphones and full-volume listening…Tracks 11 through 16 (all 7:00 or 7:01 in length) are in audio, “soundworks that exploit the limitations of basic digital equipment.” Buzzy clicks of quietly deformed data innocuously expand into frizzly little carpets of microfibers. The crispy noises are never loud enough to be truly “noisy” and certainly qualify for being ambient by virtue of their ignorability (whether you want to or not). I don’t have a problem with immedia’s mini-micro-digital soundscapes themselves, but their utter fragility confounds me… some may view/hear the sensitivity of 2/1 as a plus, like finely wrought crystal of a most frail nature. Call me old-fashioned, but if I’m going to listen to some music (or sounds, however experimental), well… I want to hear it! Paradoxically, I still bestow an 8.2 for the damn-conventional-listening spirit of these teasing electronic wraiths.
(ambientrance, usa)
2/1 re-proposes some stuff already published on two extremely limited edition CDR’s between 1998 and 2000, “In Audio” and “Virtual Recordings of Imagined Spaces”, invisible sounds, dim chatterings, microwave ectoplasms: ghastly empty simulacrum of a world at the borders of silence. Again a void without a vote.
(blow up, italy)
… in the vein of bernhard günter, the work here is subtle and relfective, ranging from the inaudible to the quiet. Tones sneak in at the highest audible level, only to fade from below at the lowest. These two conceptual pieces are not for the neophyte of lowercase sound, but for the seasoned fan of this distinct catalog.
(xlr8r, usa)
