Don’t listen for the koto or the pitch pipe. No doubt they are in there, but asking where, exactly, is to go down a deep sonic rabbit hole. The “there” in question is a 15-minute collaboration between Gretchen Jude and Subnaught, each of whom brought one of those two instruments, along with a sampler, to the session. The result is a resounding and extended thrum, sometimes sedate as newly roused cicadas, at times like an autobahn heard from the distance through a thick mass of trees, often resembling what the BBC Radiophonic Workshop taught several generations to recognize as the imminent appearance of unidentified flying objects. No doubt the string and wind instruments provide rich resonance, but in the samplers they are pushed until the result is closer to a bellows instrument, an impression reinforced by the undulating sine wave that seems to run through the full performance.
The track’s tags helpfully identify the samplers as being of both the software (Bidule) and hardware (Roland SP-404) variety. Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/subnaught. More on Subnaught at subnaught.org, and on Jude at gretchenjude.weebly.com.