Philip Jeck immolates and ravishes his records. In giving them over to the turntable, one sort of inexorable procession tapers off and an unraveling of another kind begins to find its breath. Records, once kept at a distance, converge spontaneously, spiraling into an escalation of sound-events. It's thus a music alluring in its shifting, snaking forms, telling in its evasiveness, memory, loss, and regeneration.
Sand seems an apt title in that it captures precisely this: pouring down, its pageantry of particles appear random and arbitrary in one sense, but in another way they burst with connection and share in a rapport of form. And so there are Jeck's records: penetrated in every possible way, seething in every possible direction, arriving unexpectedly, but with initiatory form and guided metamorphosis.
Less gritty and abrasive in texture, and seemingly less strategic than past efforts such as Surf and Stoke, Sand is more of an enchantress. It's quiet, but not still. To the contrary, it's constantly moving, at times markedly abstract and ratiocinative, at times symphonic, pictorial, impressionistic even. Jeck seems to be examining his sound and its processes, but at the same time he spins a linear narrative. He is always coming back to his own subtly altered premises at the end of each episode, thus making each piece feel complete as a whole, and necessary in all of its parts. In this manner, from disparate source materials, he fashions .personalized terms of texture and structural tension that are both lucid and mysterious.
Similarly, pieces are built upon conflicting but coinciding themes of spaciousness and confinement. Pieces open up onto a majestic vastness, its lines stretching off to an implied infinity, but always brushing up against a sort of ozone layer, which lends the proceedings a paradoxically closed feeling, leaving one with dense sound-fields. What perhaps most appeals is how every now and again, quite unexpectedly, very minor slippages or variable elements - some streams of piano or fluttering of flutes - peek through the fog or are simply exposed quite unwittingly. These are regal, finely shaped, arresting pieces, traversed with much of the grace and weakness of life on this sublunary plane.
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