Labels: Runningonair Music
Review by: Captain Fidanza
Although this release from the Runningonair label sounds like it might be Ben Burtt’s favourite album, it contains one element which immediately raises it above the domed head of R2-D2 and makes it something far more mysterious.
Accompanying the CD, housed in a recycled, fold-out, cardboard sleeve is a small piece of paper on which one hundred individual black and white square patterns have been printed. All fairly normal so far you might think, that’s the sort of thing electronic music people do when they are trying to draw lines between their creations and the world of science. But, someone has drawn a circle around one of the patterns with a red pen.
Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: “When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever their diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come together in the red circle.”
Who amongst us could possibly hazard a guess as to the significance of the pattern contained within the red circle? Is the answer to the mystery, or perhaps a clue to guide us hidden within the gentle, yet ever-tightening rhythms of this music?
One thing which strikes the careful observer is the inverse contained within the titles of the first and final songs.
Song 1 “” Fourier-Gabor
Song 11 “” Gabor-Fourier
In addition to this, surely the fact that it is songs 1 and 11 which contain the same words but in a different order is not a coincidence. It can’t be, it just can’t be.
I listened very carefully for clues through the forty eight minutes and fifty seconds, but not a clue could I find. At one point I thought I heard someone say “Skinner” but they could just as easily have been saying “skimmed-milk” so I returned to the piece of paper itself for further analysis and was both flummoxed and flabbergasted by what I found there.
The creator of this music has taken each song on this album and explained in scientific detail, the methods through which each piece of music was created, surely the answer to the mystery was to be found here. Unfortunately his continued use of phrases like “uncertainty principle” and “granular synthesis” rendered much of what he had written entirely incomprehensible so I was forced to stare at the one hundred black and white patterns for the remaining twenty minutes of the record in the vague hope that an answer might present itself. It didn’t though.
This is a really brilliant album full of strange and unusual sounds which have seemingly been created through some strange and unusual techniques. What’s more, unlike much of the electronic music which has found its way to my desk over the years, the beating heart of humanity seems to resonate somewhere close by. Any album which contains a piece of music constructed from the sonification of weather data recorded every two minutes across twenty four hours is surely something to be reckoned with.
But the mystery of the red circle remains.