Marc Barreca: A Discourse of Mist
Palace of Lights

K. Leimer: Proximate Forms
Palace of Lights

With the release of Proximate Forms and A Discourse of Mist, sound sculptors Kerry Leimer and Marc Barreca enhance their respective discographies, while their latest with kindred spirit Steve Peters shows the magic that happens when like-minded experimentalists congregate. Leimer's story is particularly remarkable, seeing as how it extends back to the mid-‘70s when he started making music and when in 1979 he founded Palace of Lights as an outlet for forward-thinking work by himself and others. His career could be viewed by up-and-comers as a blueprint of sorts for how creative work might be sustained over a long period without concession or compromise. That he and his PoL brethren continue to craft and release material unsullied by commercial concern is a testament to the integrity of their vision and commitment to the experimental field they operate within.

Reading the press releases accompanying the recordings is an experience unto itself. The one for Leimer's characterizes the music as “(s)uspended, broken, distorted, dismantled, and reassembled on wavering, shifting timelines,” and as seeping “through intermittent gaps, hinting at other voices, other structures, other phrases that appear and mutate as they become a part of the whole—or just fall apart.” Manipulations and re-samplings of mysterious kinds result in abstract collages of alien form, audio Rorschachs amenable to any number of readings. Track titles suggest interpretive directions but seem ultimately provisional, in this case ten titles affixed to separate one piece from the next but beyond that of questionable import or significance.

That said, some indeterminate sense of contraction does crystallize during “Dilate,” though the mass congeals and flutters as forcefully. For six minutes, degraded, blurry sheets of sound convulse while some semblance of a regulated pulse struggles to assert itself. As wiry tones flicker and hum, a hall-of-mirrors-like quality materializes that induces disorientation as the listener struggles to locate a stable ground. On the other hand, it's safe to say that the stuttering miasma that ripples through “Birdsong” sounds like no ornithological species any human's conceivably encountered. Raw smears of percussive, granular textures rattle through “Ceaseless,” their movements punctuated by sharp-edged string bowings and the gut-punch of electric bass throbs.

Apparently generated from a single guitar stroke, “Rift” billows and cascades like a swelling, reverberant cloud mass. The shimmering sheets that glisten and gleam in “Scarcity” hint that a piano might have been similarly exploited to create it. Manipulations are typically so extensive they reduce such conjectures to guesswork. However much it's buried under grainy textures and warped piano, the low-slung thud of a beat can still be detected burrowing through “Sanguine”; a plodding lurch and guttural bass likewise drive the metronomic, bell-accented daze of “Index.” While a given track might suggest that acoustic instrument sources have been so subjected to processing they've lost their identifying character, hints remain. Acoustic bass pulses animate “Coated,” for example, alongside thrums conceivably sourced from a dulcimer or perhaps harp.

Leimer's created immersive masses so deep one could drown in them. It would be interesting to view a breakdown of the layers he used to create a specific track and the instruments also called upon; at the same time, pulling back the curtain would take away some of the mystery by reducing it to a technical exercise. Decades removed from his first forays into music-making, he shows no sign of creative wear-and-tear, as shown by these productions and intimated by the fact that Proximate Forms is but one of three collections scheduled for release this year, with Resting and Muted still-to-come instalments in his Forms series.

Barreca's been a Leimer associate since the beginning—his Twilight, reissued on vinyl in 2018, appeared on PoL in 1980, a year after its founding—and like him has been a vital creative contributor to the electronic-experimental music scene since the mid-‘70s. For Barreca's latest venture, inspiration came indirectly from Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, in which “a mist of forgetfulness descend(s) on the people, obscuring memory but not distorting historic truth,” according to the press text for A Discourse of Mist. In a timely inversion, Barreca's turned to false science, rumour, and conjecture as creative conduits, the focus here being things that “are not simply obscure but literally false.” Eleven hazy constructions give physical form to such states of indeterminacy, misdirection, and sleight-of-hand, but countering that are emergent melodic gestures that lend structure and impart however tentatively coherence and lucidity; consider by way of example the way piano helps brings shape to the otherwise pulsing stream that is “Pym Particles.” The title that most directly references the project theme is “False Construct,” though “Sublimation” and “A Hidden Process” allude to it also.

Using modular and virtual synthesizers, samplers, and granular effects to produce the material, Barreca embarks on a scenic travelogue that's wholly complementary to Leimer's. Enigmatically titled (e.g., “Baryon's Aether”), the tracks on A Discourse of Mist pulsate, flutter, shudder, and shimmer like alchemical potions that gradually take on some semblance of identifiable form. Layers of burbling micro-fragments assemble into vertically dense soundscapes that more soothe than frazzle when Barreca shapes the material with care to achieve balance. Even at its densest and most opaque (see “Luminiferous”), the material never loses its coherence and stability.

“False Construct” is a particularly beautiful example of the artistry in play, with snippets of piano and synthesizers drifting across the percolating mass and helping to lend it form; pretty too are “Akasha,” whose flute-like tones and guitar flutter evoke the panoramic splendour of an open landscape, and “A Hidden Process,” a resonant, chorale-like meditation rich in melodica and harmonium timbres. As abstract as it is, his music isn't without an emotional dimension, as the plaintive quality permeating “Sublimation” shows, while the deeply atmospheric setting that follows, “Red Mercury,” indicates how contrasting one track is from the next when choral breaths and tinklings emerge from its ominous rumblings.

Another momentous event occurred in 1980 when Leimer, Barreca, and Peters met for two little-attended shows in Olympia, Washington, and the latter also established a connection to PoL by appearing as a guest on Barreca's Twilight. Forty-five years later, the three now release Fluorescent Grey, their third collaboration under the Three Point Circle name. As to be expected, TPC isn't a group in the conventional sense, one that plays onstage and tours as a trio. It's an outfit, instead, that collaborates remotely, winging files back and forth and manipulating the material until all three sign off on the finished product. Working this way, they both impose their individual signatures on the music but also humbly cede control to the collective process. After a given track originates from one, the material is reshaped by the others until the piece, having mutated through multiple iterations, retains little trace of its origins.

In another trio's hands, the material might build aggressively into noise pieces; in TPC, the nine settings more generally gravitate toward calm, their character, not unwelcomingly, more minimalist than maximalist. One might be reminded at one moment of Eno's Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks or Music for Films during the album's more peaceful passages. The opening “Grey Fluorescence” sets the tone with a drifting meditation that hints instruments as diverse as piano, organ, harp, and banjo might conceivably have been used in its construction (no gear-related details are included, though we're informed that different digital and sampled sources were used to generate the pieces). The presentation shifts from one piece to the next, however: ”Common Misophonia” shimmers like some haunted, gently convulsing dreamscape; “Dull Flares” expands with controlled electrical fire into a rattling, strings-smeared colossus; the murky "Nearly Remote” plays like some desperate transmission from a dying alien civilization; "Grapheme Form” paints a scene of banjoists picking at a gurgling, electrified swamp; and so on. Each smoldering, slow-burning setting unfolds with deliberation and every gesture and texture thoughtfully considered. Eno called one of his Another Green World tracks “Spirits Drifting,” and the title's one TPC could have used in place of Fluorescent Grey to convey the music's intoxicating effect.

April 2025