Cyclic Defrost Magazine

The Refractors - 8 Year Sleep (Dynamophone)

Posted: 06 Apr 2009 03:58 PM PDT

8 year sleep

The slow, heavy and subharmonic backdrifts that wend through 8 Year Sleep play like a narcotic panacea for the endless spools of disenchanted musings that curl through Kayline Martinez clear throat. Better still, they placate just as Mrs. Martinez speaks of uncanny and uncongenial reminiscences, the lacuna dangled between them adding an unnerving punctum to the proceedings.

Equally important, the dissymmetry that holds and remains here for the duration of the brief 3” album ensures that the drifting music doesn’t move too frictionlessly. The ambient textures, though plush like a cloud, are charged with arcs of flanging electricity, invested now and again with blackened waves of rumbling from the low end, and stirred by simple, lurking shadow-cast melodies.

Resistances of ample strength and variety are thus established over the course of the work and better allow the organic forms to stand out and assert themselves. Taken together, the interaction between these elements have both dynamic and static aspects peal through the work. The end result is a tranquility marked by rich shades of unease.

Max Schaefer

Chris Abrahams and Clare Cooper - Germ Studies for Guzheng and DX7 (Splitrec)

Posted: 05 Apr 2009 09:53 PM PDT

My strongest (not fondest) memory of the DX-7 is of a shabby cover band performing ‘Sunglasses at Night’ on Cottesloe Beach sometime in the eighties. That sound is a hard one to trace here, fortunately, where The Necks’s ivory tinkler Chris Abrahams turns his hands to deconstructing the synthesizer, alongside Berlin-based Australian harpist Clare Cooper on the guzheng (Chinese zither). The pieces are very short (between five seconds and five minutes), as are the gestures: small clinks, spurts, pings and belches, the familiar language of reductionist electro-acoustic improv. Recorded between 2003 and 2008, this fascinating release reflects such an extended, intensive period of creative involvement, and is complimented by the lavish presentation: a book-sized two disc set, with fold-out poster featuring Anthony Braxton-esque sketchings by friends and colleagues (Oren Ambarchi, Tony Buck, Stephen O’Malley, Otomo Yoshihide) representing the 198
tracks/germs that make up this behemoth.

Subtitled ‘198 scratches, itches and ailments’, the analogy with germs is entirely appropriate - pieces flit to life like mating cells, making skewed, suprise lurches and appearing generally feverish throughout. The interplay between artists is never less than enthralling, their actions raw, revealing, and lovingly recorded, a ceaseless procession of sounds veering off in all directions. Instrumentally its an odd pairing, sure, but seen as an updated form of the violin sonata, in Webern-esque miniature, drawn by post-onkyo minimalists, it begins to make sense.

Joshua Meggitt