five elements music, andrea marutti, jim haynes
tri-ton
(obs027) CD

Tri-Ton is a Russian publication of long-form, deep-drone exercises featuring the inner-space cosmonauts Five Elements Music, the Italian dark-ambient practitioner Andrea Marutti, and the California decay-artist Jim Haynes. Five Elements Music presents a 23 minute excursion of dissonant drones which twists into a glowing set of rarified tones by the end of the piece, as if something unsettled and slightly threatening had become contemplative and soothing. One could think of an Oren Ambarchi piece morphing into one of Jonathan Coleclough's more placid moments. This track served as a guide for the following tracks. Marutti, who had recorded for the shadowy isolationist project Amon, laces gong tones and subterranean echoes around a steady drone that steams from oceanic vents with plenty of lugubrious drippings of reverb and liquid soot. The Haynes piece is one we, of course, are quite familiar with, given that he recorded that here at The Agency as the soundtrack for an expanded cinema presentation in collaboration with Allison Holt at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Haynes took the Five Elements Music track as an excuse to explore something akin to a Thomas Koner composition, with long sustained periods marked by glacial melodic episodes and revelatory gestures in addition to the consummate textural construction he's known for. The resultant 20 minute track rises through sinewy shortwave tones and up to a huge growling snarl of turbines and motors, eventually collapsing into a series of heartbeat rhythmic crawl and sweeping oscillations made from filtered electro-magnetic interference captured within one of the WWII era bunkers that dot the California coastline. A brilliant and haunting conclusion. - Helen Scarsdale

Limited edition of 400 copies.