K. Leimer and Marc Barreca: Arrhythmian
Palace of Lights

Kerry Leimer has been producing boundary-pushing electronic music since the mid-‘70s and, remarkably, possesses a creative energy that shows no signs of flagging. Much of his music has appeared on Palace of Lights, which he founded in 1979 and has also provided an outlet for the work of kindred spirits such as Steve Peters and Marc Barreca. Leimer and Barreca have collaborated five times during the past four decades, the first time in 1980 on Leimer's first solo album Closed System Potentials and most recently on the double-LP set Arrhythmian.

Par for the Palace of Lights course, the release is beautifully presented, with the vinyl discs cozily housed within a glossy gatefold sleeve. Provocative cover images show complex configurations of micro-elements and worm-like entities, with each photo alluding to the density and intricacy of the duo's musical constructions. Open it from the front and its inner sleeve credits six tracks to Leimer / Barreca; flip it over and open it from the back and the inverted inner sleeve lists seven differently titled tracks, with the credit now reading Barreca / Leimer. Perhaps the two generated separate album-length sets using the same base materials as a starting point, but nothing clarifies the detail one way or the other. The point's moot anyway when the result stands on its own terms.

In keeping with the album title, Barreca opines, “Let's just say it's not music you can dance to...,” though that's not entirely the case when some tracks are grounded in clearly delineated rhythm structures. Having that foundation in place allows for the material layered on top to wend as wild and unpredictable a path as might be imagined. Some pieces, on the other hand, are untethered by beat patterns and are as abstract as anything the two have created before, either together or separately. Texture and sound design are paramount, as the two use sampling, granular synthesis, processing, and other sound manipulation strategies to create these petri dishes of sub-atomic activity, self-contained miasmas that convulse, burble, percolate, and flutter. Found sounds, electronics, analog instruments, and field recordings are presumably some of the sources used as raw material to generate the release's incessantly mutating settings. Those originating elements, whatever they are, are largely unidentifiable after having been processed beyond recognition, and consequently each piece registers as an exercise in pure abstract sound.

Arrhythmian begins with one of its more beatcentric tracks when “Panic for Ideas” underlays an engulfing radioactive force field with a churning, bass-thudding pulse. A throbbing bass figure drives the subsequent “Exfiltration" too, though it's otherwise dominated by a shrieking cluster of distorted noise and viral convulsions. “Misplaced Trust” carves out a comparatively subdued and even melancholy space, though the activity level is as dynamic as it is in the first album's other five pieces. The fluttering figures coursing through “Haze of Being,” on the other hand, suggest nothing less than the hand-cranked creak of a hurdy-gurdy. There are moments on the Leimer / Barreca half where the combination of electronics and beats calls a little bit to mind the vocals-free material on Eno's Nerve Net (1992), if pushed to a much more severe and uncommercial extreme. Even that's a stretch, however, when the material so completely inhabits its own realm.

Of the two halves, it's Barreca's that's a tad more aggressive and even perhaps denser. At the start, the jittery “Caldera” stutters and flickers rapidly, after which “Acquired Learning” introduces a new element in sprinkling a speaker's droning voice across the burbling base. When an identifiable sound surfaces, like the piano fragment that emerges in “Known to Some,” the effect is startling for being so unexpected. Arresting moments regularly occur in the second half, be it the gamelan-reminiscent percussive gestures of “Agonists” or the electrical currents that surge through “The Impartiality of Sound” and charge it with insistent drive.

June 2024