textura

Albums
Autistici
Barker & Baumecker
Marc Barreca
Steve Bug
Terrence Dixon
Cornelius Dufallo
Christian Fennesz
Fur Coat
Stefan Goldmann
The Green Kingdom
Chihei Hatakeyama
Benjamin Herman
Insa Donja Kai
Julia Kent
Kid606
K. Leimer
loscil
Lymbyc Systym
MayMay
Markus Mehr
Mutamassik
Personable
Glen Porter
Tom Recchion
Karriem Riggins
Steve Roden
Strategy
System Of Survival
Henry Threadgill Zooid
Twigs & Yarn
Yousef

Reissued
John Coltrane
Roxy Music
Wayne Shorter

Compilations / Mixes
Deep Love 2
Fabriclive 65: DJ Hazard
Robag Wruhme

EPs
Ahern and Packard
Dreamsploitation
Henry & Louis
Jacksonville
Sven Laux
Phasen & Refurb
Pleq + Hiroki Sasajima
Sontag Shogun
Strategy
Strom Noir
Nobuto Suda
Andy Vaz

Marc Barreca: Tremble
Palace Of Lights

A title like Tremble only hints at the tumultuous activity level at which Barreca's fifty-two-minute recording seems perpetually pitched; representative of the album's tone, its title piece is a hyperventilating set-piece of clattering sounds. A word such as tremulous applies equally well to the collection, given the incessant movement exhibited by its ultra-dense settings. No instrumentation details accompany the release, the implication perhaps being that the listener's focus should be on the total sound-world Barreca creates in the recording's nine settings rather than individual sounds. Having said that, acoustic and electronic materials assert themselves in equal measure, whether it be in the form of synthetic textures, percussive treatments, or phase-treated acoustic instruments of sitar-like timbre. Field recordings also emerge, though sometimes the dense arrangement within which they're woven renders them less audible.

Though the typical Tremble piece enters quietly, it takes mere seconds for it to swell into the robust form it will assume for its duration—something even the recording's shortest piece, the three-minute “Squeezed From a Tube,” demonstrates. Agitated string plucks flutter alongside a mini-cyclone of electronic swirl during the aptly titled “Comet Falls,” while contrast abounds during “Suling” when clanking chains rub shoulders with blinding strings and shimmering electronics. Of all of the album's pieces, it's the final one, “Translation,” that comes closest to having a conventional compositional structure in the way it arranges saxophone, piano, horns, and strings into a flowing mass. Barreca's lava-like sound-worlds are heady constructions whose sounds spill forth in thick clusters and collectively present themselves as heaving conglomerations of shape-shifting sound (nowhere more dizzyingly than during the rather psychedelic “Periodicity”). In Tremble's case, a word like organic is less applicable than geologic, given the immense tectonic force with which its material convulses.

October 2012