Every August, Victoria's third-favourite rural sound-hermit emerges from his lair and delivers us a collection of improvised plunderphonic soundscapes, and this August is no exception. Created by live-sampling fragments from CDs with mono guitar pedals and a Kaoss Pad, A Demon Sheen creates minimalist Reichian layers of overlapping synchromysticalities, evocative and ritualistic excursions into ego-destroying void-worship.
With the GRIST project, no sounds are heard before they are incorporated into the looping churning soundscapes, so our listening experience is exactly the same as the experience of creating the music - a united voyage of discovery and improvisation, rather than a one-sided and passive experience of just listening to what someone else "composed". For good or ill, the Gristian Ritual employed in the creation of these pieces is one founded on randomness and being here-and-now. As stated in the Gristian Manifesto of 2009:
"NO INSTRUMENTS, NO COMPOSITION".
"this album definitely ticks all the right boxes if you’re
looking for some shamanic/ritual ambient/noise, or even just some unconstrained
experimentation... The music is allowed to initiate its own conversations and to
choose its own themes, with the musician being the interlocutor and
interpreter. Ideas, concepts, and perceptions are picked up and discarded, or
flow over and through each other, adding subtle hues and colours available to
the artist’s palette with which to paint the ever-unfolding vistas."
"a suite of mood pieces, ranging from the exhilarating to the
devastating. Like I noted above, the tracks were allowed to progress in their
own way, permitted to unfold as they were wont to do, organically and
naturally... This is proof that music has a
will and life of its own, and that it sometimes refuses to be constrained, or
follow the rules. Judging by the results issued here, Grist understands what
his music wants to tell him, and he trusts it enough to let it speak through
its own voice. For me, this is another winner from Sombre Soniks."
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