Paloma Wind is one of the year’s most mystifying albums, and it makes sense given the uncompromising vision of the artists involved. John Hudak is, among other things, a field recordist who is uninterested in any semblance of purity. Some of his most arresting pieces feature mangled field recordings that turn ordinary landscapes into cryptic terrain. His collaboration with Merzbow considers everyday sounds as a source of disorienting noise. In 1998, he released a track called “Winter Rain Watching the Sky From My Window” and it arrives as little more than austere, glitching electronics. Composer Eva-Maria Houben has numerous works that are simple, spacious, and long, providing opportunities to lean into the very minute qualities of a given instrument (she has released music on Edition Wandelweiser). And while her albums have featured the sounds of nature, some have been more deliberately focused on environments: 2013’s Landscapes contains one composition for “organ and train,” while Seascape from the same year is 75 minutes of water in various states of movement.
What immediately stands out about Paloma Wind is that it feels like a decidedly different sort of album than the ones that either artist typically makes. “Paloma Wind 1” has field recordings that are garbled and repeated. There are multiple rhythms constantly overlapping: a shuffled movement, gong-like bells, the patter of water, various birds and insects. It creates a sound collage that allows for different layers of perception: the more you focus on an individual facet, the more you realize it is intermingling with another one.
“Paloma Wind 2” is more spare but no less interesting. The bell-like sounds appear again and dot the landscape, and it sounds like little more than having your recording device capture a relatively still environment. Concentrating on the hum of the air is fascinating: it requires effort to focus on its quiet buzz, and doing so magnifies the gravity of every other sound’s kinetic energy. It feels like all this sound is rushing into your ears.
The following two tracks are illusory, causing one to reflect on their differences from previous tracks. “Paloma Wind 3” sounds like everything is recorded from across a giant industrial space, and that sense of distance makes it easy to revel in the way every single note reverberates. “Paloma Wind 4” sounds a lot like what we heard in the second track but clearer: the noise floor is higher, the bells and creaks are louder in the mix, and even the typical field recordings pop out. It is simultaneously the most easy to decipher—you get a real sense of the clatter being made in real-time—and most deceptively beguiling. There’s a sort of magic to the way the chimes ring out, and you feel how weighty it is when the album fades to silence and you contend with the sounds in your own immediate surroundings.
—Joshua Minsoo Kim, Toneglow
Spellbinding, spectral elisions of percussion and field recordings by veteran minimalists Houben & Hudak make a sterling new addition to Richard Chartier’s label, LINE
For just shy of a quarter century, LINE has specialised in seeking enchanting sounds from the thresholds of minimalist composition, computer music, drone, and their experimental integers. German composer and musicologist Eva-Maria Houben (b. 1955) and US sound artist John Hudak (b. 1958) here play into the label’s filigree strands of experimentation with one of its best in recent memory, developing a free-associated sound from percussion and etheric sound that can’t be full attributed tone or the other, but manifests its own tongue-tip language of rhytmelodic frissons that recalls Harry Bertoia’s steel rod Sonambient sound sculptures played by friendly ghosts. Approaching the project with a deeply shared sound sensitivity, they produce a remarkably engaging suite from the process of listening as composition, and vice-versa, that requires no prior knowledge of their concept in order to enjoy its hallucinatory frolics, which are bound to be enjoyed by fans of Marina Rosenfeld, Giuseppe Ielasi, Michael Ranta.
— boomkat.com
