(2020) Aperus - Archaic Signal


Review:
Brian McWilliams, who records as Aperus, filters natural and technological sound through a surf of static, creating large-scale, echoing soundscapes that hear the world as if from a vast distance. The artist, who lives in the desert in New Mexico, has lately been sampling the sounds gathered by a high powered antenna at a university in the Netherlands (the sounds are available via an online interface). Shards of foreign conversation, choral singing and other elements flutter through his ambient atmospheres, not quite heard but evocative. Listening feels like hovering in space, half-tuned to the world’s transmissions and aching for life and connection. “New Antenna,” for instance, emits a dopplering electronic hum which seems to move toward us and away in slow pulses. Against this backdrop, distorted voices float in and out of our peripheral hearing. A man with a Russian accent repeatedly declares, “Now I have a new antenna.” The cut is full of mysterious, hissing, vibrating tones, which seems to imply large, empty spaces, desolation and the futility of long-distance communication. The title track is lighter, airier and filled with a hovering anticipation; it sounds the inner workings of a submarine, but also like prayer and revelation. Towards the end, something that sounds like a massed choral hymn bobs up out of the stew of sounds then recedes, bracketed by the beep sequence for a non-working phone number. These two are likely derived from McWilliams’ antenna project, but he also mines and distorts and obscures natural sounds from his desert environment for a similar effect. The long “Birdsong as a Mantra” lays an ominous buzz under the sounds of birdcalls. Electronic hums zoom in and out of focus, leaving jet trails of dissonance, as the birds chirp in a repeated loop over and over again. The electronic sounds keep us at a distance from the natural ones, erecting a scrim of temporal or physical remove. We don’t so much feel surrounded by nature as exiled from it; there is a sense of longing in the cut. Later tracks are more luminous and musical, letting pristine electronic tones linger over the hiss and seethe of static. “Silver Birds,” “Archeodreaming” and “Afterglow” all approach overt melody, but back away, dissolving big church-organ-ish tones into a vibrating mesh of sensation.  These are enveloping, encircling washes of sound, which never cohere into songs per se, but provide engrossing places to stay and absorb sensation for a little while.





Tracklist:
01 - New Antenna
02 - Archaic Signal
03 - Phase Shift
04 - Newspaper Rock
05 - Canopy of Stars
06 - Birdsong As Mantra
07 - Silver Birds
08 - Archaeodreaming
09 - Afterglow


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