textura

Albums
Aera
Apricot Rail
Darcy James Argue
Jeri-Mae G. Astolfi
Félicia Atkinson
Atom TM
Black Jazz Consortium
Borghi and Teager
Kate Carr
Jace Clayton
Nicholas Cords
Cosmin TRG
Benjamin Damage
T. Dimuzio / Voice of Eye
Field Rotation
Footprintz
Garnica
Stefan Goldmann
Good Luck Mr. Gorsky
Darren Harper
Chihei Hatakeyama
Jerusalem In My Heart
Marsen Jules
Philippe Lamy
Mary Lattimore
Linear Bells
Jay-Dea López
Andrew McPherson
Markus Mehr
Oneirogen
Fabio Orsi & pimmon
Quicksails
Simian Mobile Disco
Colin Stetson
The Third Man
Simon Whetham
Yuco

Compilations / Mixes
Art Department
Balance presents jozif
+FE Music: The Reworks
Ruede Hagelstein
Inscriptions Vol. 2
Rebel Rave 3
Your Victorian Breasts

EPs / Cassettes / Singles
Broken Chip
City of Satellites
Fescal
Isan
jffstnhs
Librah
Yann Novak
Simon Whetham

Fabio Orsi & pimmon: Procrastination
Home Normal

Italian composer-guitarist Fabio Orsi and Australian musician Pimmon (aka Paul Gough), who pool their considerable talents for four long-form settings on this Home Normal vinyl outing (250 copies), would seem to be a match made in experimental soundscaping heaven. Certainly the forty-four-minute result suggests that they're kindred spirits, at least in terms of the music sensibility captured on the recording. The title? Having made the decision to collaborate, the process began with Orsi giving Gough material that the latter began to hear as fully realized, and, bewildered as to what he might add to it, experienced a period of procrastination as he tried to figure out what he might do to make good on the collaboration idea. After eighteen months passed, the creative dam broke when Gough revisited Orsi's material and began to see ways by which to build on it. It wouldn't be inaccurate to hear the album as Orsi refracted through Pimmon's bold prism.

An initially jarring alarm tone sends “I Wish You Were In Yallingup” on its way, but a vaporous cloud formation emerges to impose calm, its mass so huge, in fact, that it swallows the alarm tone whole as it slowly advances and swells in density and volume. As becalmed, placid melodies faintly intone at its center until they, too, are overwhelmed by a second wave of swirl, this time seemingly guitar-generated. Everything moves at a glacial pace that allows the listener ample opportunity to trace the music's slowly unfolding arc across the vast open skies—much like those on the album cover watching the planes from within the airport.

“Garnacha” pairs the warble and thrum of indeterminate bird species with a heavy-lidded ambient-drone mass that flows with a lava-like stealth as it slowly spreads across the terrain. Alternately convulsive and graceful, the drone finds itself confronted by guitar shadings of equally grandiose character until all of the separate strands merge and metamorphose into an ever-expanding maelstrom of mutating design. String tones inaugurate the title track, though, true to form, they're absorbed into a swelling mass of haze that grows progressively more deranged as the minutes pass. Of all the album's pieces, it's this one that's the most Pimmon-like in the degree to which it plunges the listener into a hallucinatory zone that plays like a psychotic episode transcribed into musical form.

In the aftermath of the nightmare, writhing electronic noises flutter through “Just One More” until a hyperactive array of shimmer and crystalline guitar washes floods the extraterrestrial expanse to spirit away the whole, like some galaxial colossus whose light-speed movement appears almost motionless to the eye when the mass is so large. It makes sense that Procrastination's four tracks would all push past the ten-minute mark, as material of the kind presented on the album needs space and time in order for its slowly shifting transformations to come into being. Adventures in sound they are, and such adventures need time to unfold.

April 2013