Golden Retriever
Rotations

'Rotations' (Thrill Jockey Records) is the latest album from the Golden Retriever project by the duo Matt Carlson and Jonathan Sielaff.

As one of the main and most typical projects of the Chicago, Illinois-based label, the Portland duo has likely explored, throughout all their releases over the years, every aspect and experiment in the field of modular sound synthesis and electronic music in the strictest sense.

This album, recorded between September and October 2015 at the Yale Union in Portland with the contribution of Branic Howard of Open Field Recording, is practically commissioned work, as the Golden Retriever were invited by the Regional Council of Art and Culture of Portland to create their own original sound installation at the historic 'The Old Church' in the city, where a significant portion of the recording phases also took place.

This, unlike other instances, involved a more methodical and scientific approach to the compositional phase and recording processes, involving a whole series of musicians including the Mousai Remix String Quartet consisting of Erin Cole, Shin-Young Kwon, Jennifer Arnold, and Marilyn De Oliveira; Jen Harrison (French horn), Colin Frey (organ), Catherine Lee (oboe), Matt Hannafin (percussion), David Coniglio (vibraphone), John Savage (alto flute).

Clearly, the opportunity for the duo was particularly interesting and in a sense 'tempting', not least because of the importance and 'public' recognition from their city's institutions, but especially for the chance to experiment with new methods in composition and recording. Therefore, the final result is somehow original compared to other productions.

The work is conceptually centered around the principle of 'rotation', and listening to this album coincidentally coincides, in my case, with the reading I began last night of a novel by the Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan (one of the leading contemporary authors in the genre), in which one of the central themes, within a literary work I would definitely define as complex, if not downright difficult and particularly 'technical', concerns space-time travel via a spaceship executing a sort of oscillating motion in order to safeguard the safety of a planet endangered by meteorite bombardment.

The thought is of the ebb and flow of sea waves on the beach, or when they crash forcefully against a rocky surface, and that parallel with the process of 'rotation' that can be considered both in terms of continuum and energy production. Perhaps the representation of both these aspects is what the Golden Retriever propose within this work.

The first track, 'Pelagic Tremor', starting from the title, is clearly a sound representation of a true sea storm. The work is loaded with a certain droning energy, and the sound literally engulfs the listener in continuous and repeated waves of sound that overlap one another. 'A Kind Of Leaving', the second track, like the concluding and evocative, dramatic 'Sunsight', is instead a more complex and meditative composition, with the more typically 'new age' element becoming more central within the proposed sounds, and in representing more avant-garde sounds and typically concrete music, the Golden Retriever look to the compositions of Philip Glass and certain evocations of Ryuichi Sakamoto and avant-garde experimental and nocturnal jazz.

'Tesselation' is an ideal continuation of 'A Kind Of Leaving': the underlying sound fabric remains the same, but on this, synthetic music threads and sound wave alterations are introduced and become dominant, reaching higher pitches compared to the previous ones, with 'thrilling' and space-music suggestions in the style of soundtracks of the genre starting with the most representative of '2001: A Space Odyssey'.

'Thirty-Six Stratagems' is an episode of pristine and minimal ambient music: the sounds in this case are both chaotic and a representation of a state of calm in a continuous contrast between yin and yang. The idea is one of sound evoking civilizations far away in space and time, human settlements that were already cities before history could even be defined as such, and in a sort of parallel with what is the development of the 'creature' man from its generation to its growth and development in the womb until birth. Perhaps thinking of a local work like 'Fetus' by Franco Battiato here, in this specific case, is not entirely wrong. 'Thread Of Light' is perhaps the most minimal song contained within the album, where the style very much resembles that of Brian Eno: the sounds are as minimal as they are refined and descriptive, fully justifying the definition of 'soundscape'.

As usual, in the case of recordings like this, we are faced with something that may not suit every type of listener. This does not mean there are listeners with more sensitivity than others. In my case, I would simply talk about taste and predisposition and interest in a type of sound over others. What is certain is that this is a refined, curated, well-done work, and its contents on a purely emotional level are equivalent to the skill of its interpreters.

The rest, like my final judgment, relates more to what an opera of this type might mean when considered as such and according to one's own attitudes.