Pimmon: Electronic Tax Return, and: Pimmon: Secret Sleeping Birds (review)

Pimmon, a.k.a. Paul Gough, makes music that evokes very physical objects, often sounding like a oncefunctional machine abandoned to nature. Imagine a hybrid of an electrical, mechanical, and chemical apparatus that you might find in an old university basement, clunking into life, not quite sure of its purpose anymore, but with power in its veins. Some of its circuits burn out immediately, whereas others vacillate between off and on, having not quite decided if they are awake or not. Set this against the dusty, half-light of a long-forgotten laboratory and you have a typical Pimmon soundscape.

The two albums reviewed here both evoke this eerie imagery, but there are also dialogues with other genres, quirky character traits, and plenty of spirit.

Electronic Tax Return is a live recording taken from an Australian music festival, The Big Day Out, in 2001. First impressions indicate a dominance in the "crackle and ambient" fields. Indeed, the sounds here bring to mind the likes of Christian Fennesz and Oval. Each component is precisely layered, generating a counterpoint that sustains itself throughout the album.

Focused listening reveals two main components. The first, a wide river of ambient drone—the sum of many noisy tributaries—flows regally across an arid backdrop of open-mic silence. The harmonies created out of this, amid the detritus of the surrounding landscape lend a sense of stately grandeur. This is counteracted by what sounds like a glitch freeway, crossing the ambience at right angles, to create almost the opposite effect. The dusty, scratchy flak flies across the soundfield at tremendous speed, rendering a powerful dynamic that touches the extremes of glitch. Each individual pop highlights the stark contrast both within its own cohort and of the collective ambient drone that underpins the album, as if part of a lively microcosm.

Each track can be broadly described in these terms, yet each also evokes a separate character of its own. The titles seem to come from Aphex Twin's "imaginary language" school of nomenclature, implying self-conscious obscuritantism. Yemdatem is mechanical and systemic, as if a machine working against an encroaching natural force. Beach Party emerges from this initial chaos, but increases in character from the previous track. Again, systems come into play, but with more internal dialogue. Vovul lj has a more ambient base, with sublime definition and some of the harshest sounds on the album. The glitch and drone interlock beautifully, demonstrating exactly how this music is designed to work. Hints of melody poke through occasionally, reifying the design element and calling into question any aleatoric assumptions that may be drawn. Smiggins Whole/loss carries a melodic and haunting refrain, permeating the auto/electrical foreground noise against a perpetual backdrop of dissonance. Again, overgrown machinery ceded to nature is the feel here, casting a nod to the surrealist concept of allowing nature to (re)colonize the new.

Ditoko yields distant car horns and bowed cymbals wrangling for control of the soundscape, and in this respect comes close to an electroacoustic composition. The contrast is good, but it's not gentle listening. Arc Of Crown And Feather (despite sounding like an English pub) gets under the skin in a particularly effective manner; it's uncomfortable and itchy, even creeping into psychosomatic territory. The detail is marred slightly by a delay line that hasn't quite been buried fully, betraying the mechanics and eroding the overall ambience. Pulsebuzzkid seals the album with searing, distant sirens, evoking Brian Eno, but offset against precision glitch.

Despite being firmly grounded within the microtonal/glitch field, this album puts out tendrils to diverse reference points. The composer has developed their music organically, allowing it to ebb and...