Petals’ release “A Time Before The Lagoon Was Depressed” on Strange Rules bridge sonic territories: Industrial, ambient and appropriated music with traditions from 21st-Century academic contemporary music to improvised jazz.
The singular composition on this release have a distinct ‘live sound presence’, and emits a dusty and slightly deteriorating analogue sound production. The structure and momentum of the track is built around several parallel cyclic movements, free form improvisations and micro structures; which evolve, cascade – recur… with the meditative semi-claustrophobic elegance – of a underwater current generating froth-besieging waves crashing ashore. Dense, but soft and opaque sub-frequencies tremor and avalanche /// throughout // the / audial strata; while chiming and ethereal high to mid-tonalities congregate and linger above in dualistic, yet lyrical dis-harmonic / harmonic spherical formations. “A Time Before The Lagoon Was Depressed” is an intriguing piece of linear and expanding music with bio-rhythmical imprint. The audial space is refined and attentively articulated; always engaging with an in-room life-like presence throughout the composition’s duration. What could be considered technical flaws blend into the composition as added sections of instrumentation; creating an in-moment experience with gentle abrupsions, in tow textures, novel atmospheres – as well as debris passages. If composers Akos Rozmann and Bjørn Fongaard ever where to perform live with Kevin Drumm alongside Æthenor (‘En Form For Blå’ era); this is how the constellation could potentially sound.
The track could well be developed as a orchestrated 4/8-track sound collage, tracked room & studio recording – or hybrid solution of both suggestions; utilizing a selection of: Electronics, synths, equalizers, tape manipulations, objects, field recordings, samples, loops, efx, spoken word, percussion, various string instruments and mixer.
Petals is Kevin Sanders.
