Erik Schoster isn’t joking. When he says a recent soundcloud.com track of his “gets kinda loud,” he’s right — it does just that, moving not so much from whisper to scream as from whine to assault. But it does so with just the sort of slow reassessment of the sonic source materials that it becomes the musical equivalent of the old adage about cooking a frog by gently raising the temperature in a pot until it’s reached a boil. What begins here as razor-sharp whining comes to resemble a bellows instrument as the tones thicken and moisten, only to become thunderous by the time the piece reaches its end, nearly 10 minutes further on. The result is a track that asks the listener to reconsider the noisiness of noise, to try to locate when exactly rich tonal material becomes earplug-necessary listening. Chances are, they’ll say it’s around the 6:22 mark.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/hecanjog. More on Schoster, who lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at hecanjog.com.