Composed, recorded, and arranged remotely over four months of pandemic isolation in 2020, the third instalment of Vancouver New Music’s Parallels connected the organization with John Dieterich (Deerhoof) and Raven Chacon’s Endlings. Collaborating across mixed platforms using anonymous composition and improvisation methods, the avant-garde undertaking produced not just an album but a living interactive website (< parallel03.com>) that encourages visitors to manipulate its components and participate in its perpetual evolution. Foregoing credits detailing individual contributions or sound sources, its vaporous conditions suggest a digital escape from materiality, but organic existence still haunts these expressions.
Muffled noise echoes off distant surfaces and notes drip from stalactites in “Blurred Proud.” Retro broadcasts pipe in via gramophone in “Two Cheers for Anarchy.” A jazz band improvises around a looped description of the sensory attributes of evil in “Protrio Veneno.” Even “Sunshine Coast,” with its reference to the secluded mainland district of the same name (no roads connect it with the rest of B.C.), sounds anchored by physical weight. The track’s opening reverb suggests an untouchable expanse, but its stillness only lingers for a moment; when a woodwind lets out a laboured, piercing note, cacophony answers like an avalanche, with malleted toms, bashed cymbals, strings, and digital chirps surging as if to fill a void. Elsewhere, music box notes pan the stereo field before the track terminates on a feedback volley that recalls a dial-up internet connection.
Juxtaposing outmoded and ultra-modern media, Parallel 03 telegraphs an anti-archaism that defies postmodernism’s viral flattening of time, space, memory, and possibility, underlining the responsibility inherent in our meta relations.
Tom Beedham is a musician, writer, and organizer.