Sam Kidel
Disruptive Muzak

Phatic ambient.

In the sense of the phatic function of language, according to Jakobson's schema. Sam Kidel takes the hello? and variations on the theme of telephone channel checking to constellate an aqueous drone that progresses in regular waves of functional music scraps, the muzak, transfigured by reverb. With incoherent and expanded beats for two tracks and forty minutes, Vivaldi's springs and glitches, cloying piano phrases pulled by the echo.

The phatic function is not a closed compartment, not a rigid category: if I press you with are you even listening to me?, I am also communicating my displeasure to you.
And even those phatic formulas devoid of emotion, in the elegantly chiseled musical hypertext by Kidel, can be protagonists of a melancholic, sweet paranoia about the relationships humanity/machine/ether/music/humanity, in various combinations.

I think of the helloooo! cheerful and somewhat silly of someone and how I would have liked to record it to hear it again, every now and then.

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It's a record that is more conceptually interesting than beautiful, this one. However, in a month I will see Kidel perform it live, and I am curious to understand how he works, on what, and especially what the hell do people do with their heads, legs, and arms while they listen to this stuff in a warm basement.
Anyway, if you enjoy the experiments related to telephonic-telematic channel sounds, also try the record I told you about here, made with Skype glitches that at times seem like OPN. It’s still free on Bandcamp.