John Krausbauer & David Kendall: PDRM
Sounds et al

A single-movement electroacoustic composition, John Krausbauer and David Kendall's PDRM wends its rickety way for twenty-six heady minutes; a description accompanying the release informs us that the composers constructed the material “from a ‘just' tuned three-string (bowed) electric guitar with real time and algorithmic delay/spatialization processing,” a description helpful as far as technical clarification goes but one that doesn't quite capture how absorbing and discombobulating PDRM is, especially at high volume. As Sounds et al's Andy Fry correctly notes, when it ends, “there is a feeling of blissful relief—one has been elsewhere and is now returned.” It definitely feels like a journey of some kind has been undertaken and completed, be the trip blissed-out, brain-addling, or otherwise.

Throughout the piece, tones overlap and relaxedly ping-pong, with the layered mass wheezing like an overdriven hurdy-gurdy whose ‘Off‘ switch has stopped working. Initially the rhythmic to-and-fro induces a woozy effect akin to seasickness, but the ever-resilient human organism quickly adapts and begins to take perverse pleasure in the material's polyrhythmic sway and unusual tunings. PDRM isn't static either: attend closely to the sound mass as it makes its measured advance and you'll detect subtle escalations in pitch, especially as it creeps towards the finish line.

July 2018