The black thread from which the act Black Thread takes its name is the thin spool of magnetic tape in a standard cassette.
That tape is Black Thread’s medium, modus operandi, and muse. He works the material into dense, ever-shifting cathedrals of murky noises. It is some of the least digital music you will hear these days, the foundation ever slightly moving, like it exists in a state of permanent subtle earthquake aftershocks. This is music that is incapable of perfection, devoid of a metronomic pulse. It isn’t free like free jazz. It isn’t free like a hand-drawn line. It’s free like a machine that was once a source of documentary purpose, and that now lingers in gadget retirement as a folk instrument.
That insistent, unpredictable bleed is the origin of the effect from which these two pieces take their name: “Seeping Pitch.” The accompanying art is a parallel effort — same aesthetic, different medium — exploring the inaccuracies inherent in photocopy machines:
Tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/magneticassemblage. More from Black Thread, aka Gregory Gorlen, who is based in San Francisco, at soundcloud.com/blackthread.