The initial swell comes up quickly. Its brief, rapid rise is so at odds with the languorous, gauzy substance of the overall sound that the effect lingers. There remains a sense of implicit urgency, one that suffuses what otherwise seems like, in essence, the gentle overlaying of the sonic equivalent of passing clouds. The track is “Day When Spirits of the Dead’s Wrap You and Me” by Nobuto Suda, who is based in Kyoto, Japan, and who reportedly builds much of his ambient music from guitar. There is no particular evidence of guitar here: no attack, no bent strings, no instrument-specific texture or technique. What there is is a generous array of complementary sounds, and the occasional appearance of a stray one, like a comet crossing a thick night sky, or a thread of bright and incongruous material in an otherwise dense and nearly homogenous weave (MP3). The sensibility is not without precedent. There is a moment just before the 12-minute point (the piece is just over 14 minutes in length) where it sounds very much like the theme to the original Star Trek TV show.
Track originally posted at the netlabel Absence of Wax, at devinsarno.com/absenceofwax. More on the artist, Suda, at nobutosuda.org, twitter.com/n11s1, and soundcloud.com/nobutosuda1101. One word of warning: the Zip file at Absence of Wax containing the MP3 is 180 megabytes large, a hefty sum for such ethereal sounds; this is because it contains several different versions of the file (versions as in file format, not as in remix). You can also select specific file types for download at archive.org.
The brittle little shards of sound that constitute the gently swaying mechanisms of Rick Tarquinio‘s The Accidental Psaltery are just that. They are, we are told, random bits, “loops and phrases.” They are not notes set in sequence by a composer, but parts left to their own devices, sonic leaves twisting in a digital wind. Their arrangement is largely a matter of chance, in Tarquinio’s telling. But “arrangement” has varied meanings. True, the exact sequence may be a matter of chance, but the larger arrangement, the system of chance that was set in motion and the sounds that play out in it, was in fact designed by a musician. These may be two different senses of the word arrangement, but the absence of the traditional meaning of the word merely emphasizes the more contemporary meaning, a meaning akin to a kind of systems music. Thus, a track like “Without Saying,” the first of the three that comprise The Accidental Psaltery, has a unique tension (