Alex Carpenter: Chord from the Second Delphic Hymn / Emerging like an Infant from the House of Truth
de la Catessen Records

Recorded live at Luke Altmann's de la Catessen in Adelaide in August 2005, Alex Carpenter's Chord from the Second Delphic Hymn / Emerging like an Infant from the House of Truth was originally intended to be issued as a lathe cut LP, but as the results proved unsatisfactory, the set was released as a CD-R on Vanished Records. Re-issued in vinyl form, Carpenter's material is finally available as it was meant to be experienced—as a physical document of the performance, that is. Though he relocated to New York City in 2007, he established himself in Adelaide as the founder and director of Music of Transparent Means (MOTM), a loosely knit ensemble designed to bring his sensory-overloading walls-of-sound into being. That he once wrote a student essay titled “La Monte Young: Towards Absolute Music” makes perfect sense in light of the material presented on the release. Listeners with a jones for high-volume, engulfing masses teeming with alternative tunings and sustained notes will be in seventh heaven as the album plays.

In liner notes written for the 2021 release, Jon Dale refers to a particular kind of music that feels like a “bright white light shone directly into your face.” The metaphor certainly could be used to describe the experience of listening to the two Carpenter pieces birthed on that August day sixteen years ago. There's an undeniable aggressiveness to this music when it bombards the listener so relentlessly, though it would be wrong to call it static. While there is an overall shape to the enormous sound mass, the elements comprising it undergo constant change as it advances. The music advances slowly, and tension remains high when resolution is resisted, if not delayed altogether.

There is an immense physicality to the music, a brutalizing quality that naturally accrues from its manner of construction. Speaking about the first piece, Altmann states, “Each keyboard player has a sequence of notes, a sort of mantra, to play over and over, taking longer and longer to complete the sequence on each cycle. However, each note must always be repeated as rapidly, loudly, and consistently as possible, to create as close as can be to a continuous sound, before moving on to the next note.” The personnel is largely the same for both pieces, but the instruments played changes, with the keyboards emphasis of the first giving way to saxes, cymbals, guitar, and keyboard in the second. Credited with keyboard, guitar, acoustic piano, and samples, the composer's joined by Sam Carpenter, Kym Gluyas, Patrick Gluyas, Daniel Varricchio, and Altmann on the recording.

May 2021