Whether dragging leaves and cactus needles across records, amplifying stones and volcanoes or knocking various whittled sticks and seashells on a wooden box, Jeph Jerman is as deft an organizer as he is an observer of the quality of sound(s); he possesses the ability to participate just enough (aka "not-doing") to spark understated interest in the smudged sonic reality where he finds himself at the moment (a prodigious feat when you note Jerman's understatedly vast discography and just how many "moments" he has explored).
On paper, the ensemble of The Angle of Repose seems daunting ("short-wave receiver, pot lids, bao dijian tshon, saw blades, eggs in bowls, bowls and cup in sink, cassette recorders, digital 4-track, laptop"), but Jerman manages the cluster with fluid transparency. He begins the album with a dense, barely-shifting sound cloud — an experience you might have when standing too close to an air conditioning unit (though, as this journalist can testify, moving parts of those machines can produce transient alien voices that startle you from nightly slumber and force the question "what was that?") Jerman gradually sneaks in shimmering halos (fingers rubbing edges of the lids or bows across saw blades?) and works them into the basis of an agreeable wonky Gamelan orchestra, sporadically punctuating the molasses pulse with chimes and a rattling egg. As this dies out, he overlays another trope on the theme, juggling clanging metal with manipulations of the source via reverse and pitch-shift functions.
Jerman leaves form out of the picture, not necessarily arriving or even aiming but celebrating the nature of the instruments and allowing them time to relay what they need to convey until, at 44 minutes (the first piece spans nearly 33 minutes, the second — a coda of saucer tapping, object-in-bowl spinning and springy near-dub — at eleven minutes), he shuts off the tape.
On his website, Jerman explains that the desired result of his solo performances is to lose himself in the relationship of everything he's doing in conjunction with his audience noise and reactions (in the case of this disc, the kitchen), instruments and surrounding space: "...a continuous net of sound. I forget myself, as it were. This is the state I aim for each time I make a sound...without trying to force it into a structure of any kind..." From a listener's standpoint, the feeling is mutual: you will lose yourself in The Angle of Repose.
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