(2020) Todd Anderson-Kunert - Past Walls and Windows


Review:
Sounds — no, it’s not even correct to give these pulsing, streaming and vibrating entities that plodding appellation — emerge in a no-space of extraordinarily stark physicality, inhabit it and ultimately transcend it only to fall away, like leaves or neglected memories. In his notes, Synthesist (hereafter TAK) describes this album, tantalizingly titled Past Walls and Windows, as a speculation on the conjoining of spatial and temporal nexuses, and the pieces take on tactile palpability, making a mockery of boundaries as they unfold. Musically, the first two pieces bring to mind nothing so much as the modality of Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine,” though it’s stripped of traditional notions of pulse and down to the timbral center. When pulse does rear its head in the ur-groove of “Left Hanging,” the spatial distribution and pointillistic registral intrigue enhances the sense of a kind of counterpoint, a melody, or melodic rhythm, in flux even as it’s being birthed. Beyond the morphing edifice is something luminous, faintly throbbing but never quite alien, as it shares its timbral qualities with every other element, emerging from the same wavy stuff, until all else disappears as quickly as it came, leaving only the luminosity, the backdrop finally revealed to be the expanding center. Even that proves ephemeral, like the final pages of Mahler’s ninth symphony, as strands fragment and dissolve in varied silence. How ironic that a track of dislocated manifestations of the pitch spectrum can be called “A Sense of Place!” Is the place the silence sitting just beyond each quasi-melodic statement, or is it the subtly modified sonic areas of which Moog’s invention and TAK’s expert handling are capable? Just as TAK establishes what sounds like a modal center, it is destroyed by whatever you’d call the crossing of microtones in vibration, generating rhythms from inside the tones as they infest any semblance of traditional structure. TAK’s complexes of sound are as orchestral as one sound source can be, no mean feat in and of itself when register and placement are also treated with similar nuance. The exquisite thunder opening “Better Left” is complemented by the ribbed pitches at “An Echo”’s inception, beats and attendant rhythms exposed in another and equally fascinating way as each pitch temporarily takes over the space. Most striking though is how each pitch can affect the others, subtly modulating them as might happen in Stockhausen’s more expansive works. The walls and windows on display are generated from the same stuff, and their transparency or opacity is entirely unadorned by effect. This is a stark statement of sound in transition, the sonic spectrum, complete, in transition. Despite changes of all sorts and on all levels, it is a unified listening experience, each tone and sonic event influencing and being influenced by those immediately surrounding, fanning out to create a whole. TAK’s statement is as bold as it is sublimated and quietly incisive.





Tracklist:
01 - A Single Remark
02 - Left Hanging
03 - A Sense of Place
04 - A Better Left
05 - For Those That Need
06 - An Echo


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, experimental
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits