Draught. MATT EARLE, JASON KAHN, ADAM SUSSMAN
(Consumer Waste 2012)
Review by Chris Whitehead
Tactility plays a big part in the Consumer Waste universe. Letter-pressed sleeves of biscuit coloured card that come in brown paper envelopes. If you are releasing something on a physical format that you can hold in your hands, you might as well make it, well, physical. These two CDs were made available at the same time last year each in an edition of 100.
In a way they both speak the same language, with different accents and with different inflections, but still recognisably the same language.
Part I. Draught
You might well expect an improvisation featuring three men all playing electronics would lead to an overblown noisefest, but not this time. Earle, Kahn and Sussman play a music that is not defined by the space inside it, rather the space around it. Everything sounds pretty close to the ears, sometimes startlingly so. Occasionally it’s as if the vibrations are being tympanically generated or intra-cochlear in nature. Linear blips and small tides of silvery static erupt and fade, as if the musicians are trying to squeeze their tones through a tight conduit: A beam reaching out through space, highly focused and concentrated, but prone to leakage and disruption. Anything escaping is lost like a decaying particle and flickers to zero mass in the outlying darkness.
The two tracks comprising Draught last around twenty minutes each and are nameless. No meaning or reference is implied, although a compass on the cover suggests navigation, distance, direction, magnetism, attraction, positioning and precision. At points real physical activity seems to occur and then abruptly vanishes, but these recordings of movement and found sound are mere outliers to the electrical flow, which remains directed and concise.
During the second track the beam widens and becomes more disturbed. Squalling frequencies and frazzled circuits become evident. Periods of stuttering static and a falling, low resonance that refuses to disperse begins an unravelling of the music’s core. More leakage. More distance. Bristling ticks of static over bell like tones. Is this evidence of attack from outside or decay from inside? It ends on what might be a distorted communication from areas and entities unknown.
