Finally the 5th album of the imaginary German quartet - as always via Denovali. Although the title "Systeme" suggests a perhaps rather distant-cool album, it is the most personal and concentrated soundtrack so far created by Thomas Bücker from Münster in his "E-Smog-Playground" studio. In 2008, the quartet still flirted with cyrillic-mysterious melancholy and red wine-swilling trakl melancholy. 15 years and four albums later, it seems almost cynical to simply continue at this point. Because: late modernity delivers its very own complex tragedies - in real time.
This feeling of "Something's not right here" runs like a thread through the entire new album. While it still sounds popularly symphonic here and there, there are also many soundscapes that have an observing, almost unmasking effect. Microtonal shifts, polyrhythmic structures, tempo fluctuations and sound aesthetics torn out of context create a fragile, unpredictable foundation - as if Talk Talk, Tim Hecker and Skrillex were making music together and challenging our tolerance for ambiguity.
Typical of the Bersarin Quartet: sparks of optimism shimmer through everything. However, sitting back and enjoying doesn't really want to work - necessarily. Because that makes it exciting without freezing in escapism - fortunately.

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laaps 032
season: autumn
duration: 31.46 mn
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« Early morning mist in the mountains, the lakeside ripples in the stillness.
On rainy days, open the window and lie in bed.
The moment when a margin is created in me.
I want to feel these senses forever. »
iu takahashi is a sound artist and composer living in Yokohama. She produces her works using her own voice and field recordings since 2018. This is her sixth releases.

“Following on from the psychoacoustic concrète of Outside Ludlow/Desert Disco LP (BT 075LP, 2021), Sam Dunscombe returns to Black Truffle with Two Forests/Oceanic. Dunscombe has been active in recent years on multiple fronts, including as a key member of the Berlin community of Just Intonation researchers and practitioners; working with composers like Taku Sugimoto, Mary Jane Leach, and Anthony Pateras; and the release of Horatiu Radulescu - Plasmatic Music Vol. 1. "Two Forests" begins in a central Californian sequoia grove. Bird songs and buzzing insect life are treated with a variety of time-based processing methods (slicing and recombination, primitive granular synthesis, delay, and so on), which strip the field recordings of their linear, documentary character, reframing them in an enchanted web of traces and echoes. These tones are woven slowly into the field recordings, gradually building in density and complexity until the forest has been transformed into an unreal space of infinite proportions. On "Oceanic," several recordings of different beaches fade in and out to create a texture both homogenous and constantly shifting in both the rhythm of the waves and each recording's sense of depth and distance. Tones relating in simple ratios to the average rhythm of each beach float over each other, coloring the white noise texture of the field recordings with shifting hues. In both pieces, Dunscombe forgoes the easy consonance that bogs down much contemporary ambient music for a richer harmonic array informed by extended tuning practices and spectralism. The end results suggest a hitherto undreamt-of meeting of Radulescu's undulating sonic masses and the discreetly processed location recordings of Irv Teibel's "psychologically ultimate" environments. Looking beyond the insularity that can afflict experimental music culture, Dunscombe's work is a moving argument for the healing power of expanded approaches to sound and music. Even outside of a psychedelics-assisted therapy, frequent immersion in Two Forests/Oceanic is almost guaranteed to produce beneficial psychological results.”