Cyclic Defrost Magazine

The Oo-ray - Magnifications (Luvsound Records)

Posted: 17 May 2009 06:15 PM PDT

Process music is music where a knowledge of the process involved in its creation helps gain a deeper insight into what you’re listening to, which then helps you appreciate the music more. There’s an eternal debate over the value of sound where you need a description in order to enjoy it. For what it’s worth, I have no problem with music that needs to be explained to me for me to enjoy it more fully - if I can enjoy it it doesn’t matter too much how I get there. Magnifications, to my ears however, suffers from the reverse problem. The bio and actual album liner notes go to great pains to outline the process, which involves a single cello being blended through a laptop. This information had me listening out for imagined things I didn’t find in the music. So it’s taken me a number of listens to put that behind me and enjoy the sounds for what they sound like, not how they were created.

The obvious sound of a cello does make itself known at intervals across the album, such as in the introduction to ‘If We Aren’t Blind’ but mostly, it is subsumed under the sound of itself heavily processed. ‘Slow Mountain Death Scene’ opens the album with some rich bowed cello, but quickly diffuses this under waves of what sound like cymbal washes and drawn out synth chords. It sets the scene for everything that is to follow - drone improvisations, yes, but with such a depth of field and array of tone that stasis never sets in. There is a continually rich harmonic structure which shifts and eddies, giving an enormous sense of movement. And once you forget the idea of the lone cello artificially altered, it becomes much easier to simply give in to the emotional pull of the sound, rather than trying to rationalise the source material. And it is this surrender that allows the music its greatest impact. And it is truly beautiful.

Four bonus live tracks round out the release and it is here that the process can be discerned more readily, with the cello being looped, processed and played over. You can hear the different elements more clearly. It’s a very different experience to the eight main tracks, much more cerebral, but thrilling in its own way. I do think, however, that the beauty of this music is definitely strong enough to stand on its own as a pure sound experience - leave the explanations out of the way and enjoy it for what it is rather than how it was made.

(The netlabel version minus bonus tracks can be freely downloaded from Luvsound)

Adrian Elmer