Of – Becoming Wave, Leaving Particle
Cordell Klier is undoubtedly one of the most prolific musicians that I know of in the experimental scene, not quite reaching the magnitude of Muslimgauze, Merzbow, or Aube, but quite substantial by anyone’s definition. OF is one of Cordell Klier’s myriad projects from his DOCTSECT label; the “typical” sound of OF being audio weirdness in a minimalistic state. That description is fairly cryptic, but it suits the kind of cryptic music being presented here. The voice sources, unlike the “Why Am I Here?” album, are not really EVP as far as I can tell, more like field recording snippets of automated messages, and perhaps, transmissions through fiber optics (as the title of the album seem to have a concept of the essence of light, for all you science nerds out there). Only a couple of tracks here are really long; the rest of the 22 tracks fall on average around three minutes, some being only a minute long. I would have to say this is an earlier phase of Cordell experimenting with glitches and microsound wrapped up in noisy ambience backgrounds, a precursor to the “apparitions” disc on Ad Noiseam and the cdrs on Snip-Snip Records. A lot of these tracks have glitched rhythmical undercurrents and strange, warbling sounds punctuated by washes of light static. The voices are rarely intelligible to my ears; they have a strange, disembodied, mechanical aspect to it that complements the soundscapes really well. It’s an uneasy listen, as it doesn’t lull you into sleep like background music, yet it rarely grabs your attention forcefully in the foreground. It operates in-between in disjointed segments, fractures and fragments of reality and fantasy. An excellent disc. – Stephen Klusza
DOCTSECT RECORDS
Worm Gear 