g l a c i a l   e r r a t i c A test-tone slowly emerges from the ambient noise of my surrounds. Gradually my sense of space is altered, gently pulsing back and forth, the music slowly expanding and unfolding within the space - white hiss pushes my ears towards the nyquist frequency. Some fumbling in the dark; the crystalline scraping of tongues - an irrational gesture. A gorgeous acoustic sits atop the electric sound. I know these sounds, the surface noise and sine-tone, free improv's hot-wired neural system - a glimpse of a rhythm I might grasp had it not already disappeared; a melodic idea of Takemitsu's vanishing like roses in the pharaoh's tomb. What's not immediately apparent is what are they doing together? What organising principle exists? Many gestures feel random, sporadic, almost haphazard, and yet there is always a sense that everything is in the right place, a careful interplay between elements. What has been rejected is a dramatic narrative, despite the music being full of incredible contrasts; there is always a lightness of touch, a sense of restraint. In its place is a music that highlights the morphology of individual sounds, examining the precise acoustic presence of an oscillator built around 1972, the wound outer of a guitar string and resonant body, the reactive nature of plastic held taunt over a hollow cylinder. It interrogates how they occupy space, how our perception of that space may be altered by it juxtaposition parallel or horizontal to other sounds.
				download Close to Nothing.mp3 (2.3mb)
		The glistening detail of a pointed guitar scratch, sits on some tickling fizz, a delicate surface noise - a-spatial like a dead AM station, or locked groove. This complex interplay of overlapping spaces and non-spaces, reinforced though large 'silent' gaps between sounds, both over time and stereo space, can be heard as an exploded map of the fractured space that pop record production instinctively inhabits. Pop music tends towards density with a paranoid zeal, orchestrating a two minute fifty pop song with sixty odd tracks of guitar, backing vocals, synthesiser modulations, cello, etc, recorded at three different studios by five different engineers, at least a dozen separate reverbs in the mix. Western Grey have all but emptied out the collage, leaving only enough to prevent it from evaporating under the mixing consoles heat. But there need be no boredom in this 'dead air', vacant space feverishly pursued and annihilated by commercial radio, and media as a whole. The open space invites us to relax, not into an opiate induced ecstasy, but rather open our ears to a wider dynamic range than the hyper-compressed, low-bit rate encoded streaming media normally allows. A refreshing respite from the tight fisted grip RIAA has on our ears. Phillip Pietruschka