This work from Oliver Peters may be seen as an exercise in reserve and restraint: the albums three spontaneous and semi-scored pieces spare the uniqueness of the everyday objects, carefully amplified by the strategic placement and use of microphones, from reinscription in the sort of generality usually brought on by the use of computer plug-ins. Peters only employs editing procedures to wrangle fresh angles on these ordinary objects, to hide them just enough to enable the listener to find them.
Objects are often caught in miniature, all the better to enable Peters to explore both areas of chance and choice in the context of micro-sound and drone. Sounds thus flow in and out of collusion, linking and deforming slow drifts with chattering urgency and vice versa. This makes Peters come across as an acute listener, but also, and perhaps equally important, as a skilled composer, fashioning his works in a tenuous place where skill and non-skill mix and demand a sharpening of the senses from both composer and listener alike.
Max Schaefer
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