Pict.soul (review)

Tetsu Inoue and Carl Stone have produced a collaboration in pict.soul that is enigmatic, beautiful, and rich in ideas. Each composer is established in his own right, with aesthetics drawn from post-ambient field recordings and heavily manipulated samples that create slowly evolving patterns. Both styles are present in pict.soul, but the individual participants remain anonymous. The label that has released this recording, Cycling '74, is also the developer of Max/MSP technology, which is featured on the recording to good effect by both Mr. Inoue and Mr. Stone.

It may no longer be useful to speak of music that moves beyond traditional expectations, particularly to the audience that will come to pict.soul. The label of "traditional" music becomes just another straw-person, to be batted down by the disingenuous reviewer. However, there is music that relies on a previously understood contract with the audience in terms of how the material will be articulated, and then there is music that defines its own internal consistency with each listening. pict.soul is of the latter type, and it requires the listener to arrive at some pathway through the unfolding sonic events.

This approach to listening is a matter of attention, of mindfulness even, and we are given direction with the liner notes. Here, we find two haiku, worth quoting in full:

Gazing at the sea—preparation for holdingthis shell to my ear.

The soft breeze that stirsthis vast undulating fielddeafens the spider.

There is corporeality to the musical gestures. That word is chosen carefully: "corporeality," with all the biological processes involved in running a body system, and all the sensual implications of physicality. The sounds we hear when we hold a shell to the ear and the rhythms of the body form the basis for pict.soul. Rhythm is better described as concepts of pulse, articulated in nuanced layers of electronic timbre. If we could visualize a spectral analysis of the music, there would be discrete frequency ranges given over to the period defined by human breath, overlapping a gesture that maps to the heartbeat. Intertwined between both are patterns that seem to come directly from the firing of synapses. Other larger gestures reference patterns of speech, recalling the filtered conversation pieces of Paul Lansky.

Not that the album sounds like a metro car crowded with gasping hominids, or a gym full of pumping cardiovascular units. We may be immersed in the rhythms of the body, but the craft of the composers is nowhere more evident than in the marvelous display of colors used to mark out the motion of these pulse time units. Often restrained, there's an elegance to the manipulation that creates a sense of specific timbral coordinates. Motion between these coordinates propels the evolution of the music, while each plane remains constant in its process. A fantastic moment occurs in track 4, #.transparency. After three minutes of stuttering, descending clicks and buzzes, a unison emerges. It is one of the few places where a specific pitch is made explicit, and the effect is of creating not just a new timbral coordinate, but of actually adding a new axis to the spectrum.

It's nothing new to view electronic music as demarcated frequency planes of activity. The same kind of language is used to describe the instrumental music of Edgard Varèse or György Ligeti. In the music of these earlier composers, the feeling is of enormous interstitial geometric patterns, all the more remarkable when created with acoustic instrumental ensembles. Mr. Inoue and Mr. Stone work for a different affect, one that raises the question of whether there are biological constants which can be mapped to musical gestures. There's a—probably apocryphal—anecdote describing the reaction of John Cage after he visited an anechoic...