Friday, October 07, 2005

Christopher Bissonnette - Periphery

.....Just as you can make diamonds out of coal with enough time and pressure so too can you generate warmth from cold zeroes and ones. Christopher Bissonnette's work is not simply the end result but also the sound of the transformative process. "in Accordance" introduces the listener to the album with a simple assurance in the form of repeating and evolving piano notes, that there was music at the beginning and it continues, though at times subliminally. At other intervals he allows digital sound waves stripped nearly bare to approximate what fish trapped below pond ice might hear in the crisscrossing sweeps of skaters. Bissonnette leaves in sound "mistakes" which occur during editing, such as the clicks of abrupt track slicing and the digital "wow and flutter" of over-amplification which gives the effect of breath-like expansion and contraction. Each track elucidates a particular sensation yet still connects with the others for a genetic flow. "Comfortable Expectations" evokes watching a great sleeping body's slow rising and falling, while the follower, "Substrata," suggests the tingling anticipation of life set to spring up from just below the surface of... well, you pick. Other tracks, like "Travelling Light," are more musical but just as calm in their slow progression, with the rise and fall of a few organ notes bathed in static and gradually overtaken by their stutteringly altered digital doppelgangers. "Pellucidity" caps the album with a slight return to its opening theme, but is it an ending or the beginning of a new cycle in sound?

(Kranky)

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