Steve Roden & Machinefabriek
Lichtung

THE REVIEW

Excremental residues offend the nostrils like the stench emanating from open sewers, microscopic reddish pores refer to the immense solitude of Martian craters. Gentle white mites petrify the moment like Mesozoic monsters afflicted with albinism.

In fact, a wall observed up close neither blocks the way nor separates anything. On the contrary: it breaks down doors, opens windows. The improbable manifests itself with the simplicity of the everyday.

Of course, the wall must be the right one and the gaze cannot have the dull refractions or limited intentions of the first fop passing by on the street.

For those accustomed to navigating the oceans of psychic electronics, carnal electroacoustic, or skewed musique concrète, the names of Rutger Zuydervelt (aka Machinefabriek) and Steve Roden can only resonate in memory with that reverent fanfare paid to captains of fortune wrapped in a certain prestige.

Fishing in their vast discographies always has something unsettling about it. Regardless of the success or failure of each individual album, I find in the two a certain propensity and tension towards Mystique: they compose pieces, never mere exercises.

"Lichtung" is the attempt of Our Heroes to engage in the art of zoom; a tortuous yet fluid unearthing of a treasure usually hidden in the folds of sound but which here is instead put in the foreground: the field recording.

The touch of skilled alchemists who transform counterpoint into a narrative voice, the chorus of Thebans in Oedipus, the crack in a wall into a world of which the wall is its satellite. Its moon.

Equally dividing the number of pieces, Steve Roden and Machinefabriek create a rather pronounced episodic variety, without ever endangering the unity of action.

There is always an intimate coherence and concatenation aimed at developing the famous Basaglia aphorism: "seen up close, no one is normal".

Roden secretes a decidedly more circular mood. His field recordings, processed (but not denatured) by computer, fall like fungiform efflorescences on compact and regular electronic carpets.

The clear clangor of underground drips, the portions of snow crumbled by the heel of crepuscular drones, the subdued chirping of birds cradled by the timid harmonies of a zither. The soothing power of natural cycles referring (by contrast) to that notorious compulsion to repeat which plays such a significant part in human self-sabotage.

Machinefabriek probes the pathos, the looming drama, the suggestion of the sinister.

A cello that frets and fades into the outer spaces of an ice quarry, a violin that, like Ophelia, narrates its anxieties to the impetuous wind before plunging into the river. The electronic dust raised by planks trodden by hobnail boots.

A thick-textured ambient album, adventitious intuitions on faint dronic glows, the universe of a wall fractioned into field recording.

The art of zoom to assert: "heard up close, everything is a world".