Featured Artist: FURT

CD Title: Sense

Year: 2009

Record Label: psi records

Style: Free Jazz / Avante Garde

Musicians:

Richard Barrett (electronics), Paul Obermayer (electronics)

Review:

With one forty-six minute studio composition piece “Uranus,” and an improvisation dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen titled “Curtains,” the duo generates a vivid and somewhat existential trek into boundless regions of sound.  Consequently, electronics performer Richard Barrett iterates: “The music is motivated by emotional and sensual considerations as much as by anything else.”  And the program is fortified with crystalline audio, where these sound-shaping endeavors shine forth with prismatic hues and transverse angles.

The duo’s experimentalism is engineered upon semi-structured and improvised elements amid microtonal blips, quirky treatments and witty configurations.  They also intersperse digitally manipulated voices, jangling percussion simulations, and sizzling electronics forays that interweave and dissect.  Yet, the musicians generate emotive qualities, which is a factor that doesn’t always occur within these avant, electronics-based frameworks.  Whether it’s about episodes of malcontent or lighter musings, the duo executes a confederation of bizarre contrasts. 

On “Limen X,” we hear oscillating and liquefying sound-sculpting maneuvers to complement notions of a social breakdown, where visions of the future become uncertain.  In other regions, they spawn daunting vistas with ethereal jaunts into a cosmic void.  However, the preponderance of the album is not steeped in traditional ambient-electronic fare as the artists instill abundant doses of asymmetrical patterns into the grand schema.  Indeed, it’s electronics music underscored with a sense of purpose, which on the surface, might not seem possiblee via the duo's nonconforming applications.  Where others fail, these chaps succeed rather triumphantly.

Record Label Website: http://www.emanemdisc.com/psi.html

Reviewed by: Glenn Astarita

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