Tarab & Artifical Memory Trace - Obex
As this album of primarily field recordings – not the first for Tarab, at least – unfolds, “Obex” takes on a heavy serrating and almost surgical quality to the art of the re-arrangement. Fragments of sound pile up like a destruction derby composed of ant larvae. The sounds are hugely discrete music: birdsong, creaks, scrapes and crackles, the wind (as treated first on fellow field album “Wind Keeps Dust Away”). In the main of the meander there’s an eerie arcane edge, an exactness as well. Points of reference are hard to come by here; the music is wholly alien and nonconformist. An oddity of musique concrete influence, Radiophonic Workshop and John Cage all included, “Obex” showed me how pointillist sound environments really can be without, to the misnomer, becoming “point less”. A stirring diversion.
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As this album of primarily field recordings – not the first for Tarab, at least – unfolds, “Obex” takes on a heavy serrating and almost surgical quality to the art of the re-arrangement. Fragments of sound pile up like a destruction derby composed of ant larvae. The sounds are hugely discrete music: birdsong, creaks, scrapes and crackles, the wind (as treated first on fellow field album “Wind Keeps Dust Away”). In the main of the meander there’s an eerie arcane edge, an exactness as well. Points of reference are hard to come by here; the music is wholly alien and nonconformist. An oddity of musique concrete influence, Radiophonic Workshop and John Cage all included, “Obex” showed me how pointillist sound environments really can be without, to the misnomer, becoming “point less”. A stirring diversion.
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