The Seattle Phonographers Union collectively weave together gathered field recordings in real-time to create wafting auditory mirages. As each piece hovers through different combinations of environmental sounds, a milky, dreamlike logic unfolds and establishes a certain gestural rhythm. Hallucinatory aural images coalesce and then dissipate as sound combinations wax and wane lazily. Initially, this surreal opaqueness is alluring, offering immersive soundscapes that slyly defy reality.
As this continues over the span of an entire disc, though, it soon begins to grow somewhat tiresome, despite the captivating mystery within each sequence of sound-images. There are plenty of rich textures, fascinating individual sounds, and clever collective decisions. The fidelity of each recording is extraordinarily high, lending a certain hyper-real quality to the disc. Yet the sense that you’re over and over again hearing cross-fades which segue into new material tends to wear on the listener and leaves one craving either more dynamism, a different structural approach, or even, at times, more stasis. This is occasionally alleviated by the appearance of more assertive sound fields that leave bolder, more vivid impressions—either due to their content, volume level, or placement.
Even though there is plenty to love about any given moment on the album, it lacks the requisite degree of momentum to sustain this listener’s attention.
Nick Storring is a Toronto-based composer, musician, and writer, and a contributing editor to Musicworks. His music has been presented and performed by the Esprit Orchestra, Eve Egoyan, Quatuor Bozzini, Beijing’s Musicacoustica Festival, and Vancouver New Music. An avid collaborator, Storring has composed for films by Terrance Odette, Ingrid Veninger and, in collaboration with Dafydd Hughes, for the National Film Board’s award-winning Web documentary High Rise: Universe Within (2015), directed by Katerina Cizek. He’s also scored productions by Litmus Theatre and MT Space, worked with celebrated choreographers Yvonne Ng, Marie Josée Chartier, Brandy Leary, and Deepti Gupta, and created music for “ambient gaming environment” Tentacle, which was mounted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2011. Storring’s writing has appeared in Exclaim!, The Wire, and AUX.tv. He also contributed liner notes to Alga Marghen’s reissue of the ’60s band Intersystems’ entire recorded output, as well as RVNG Intl.’s box of early psych trio Syrinx’s reissues and previously unreleased material Tumblers from the Vault.