Natasha Anderson – Spore (Cajid Media)

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It’s difficult to imagine the sounds as woodwind if you didn’ know better. The piercing pitch makes it seem alive, also the way in which she seems to double it at times, playing tricks on your ears, making you wonder if its not a field recording of some strange colony of insects. Spore is a difficult album, aside from the incredible pitches she reaches, it’s also an album that dips away from earshot, reappearing in a totally different and unique realms. On Spore Anderson is primarily exploring her amazing contrabass recorder (at times on a microscopic level) though also other woodwind instruments as well as some processing via Max MSP. Though it’s quite difficult to tell the electronics from her violent gestures on her instrument. Abrupt gasps, pops, strange squiggles, rubbing, scratching and gurgles get spat out and intermingled, as air is trapped, pushed in and sucked out of the recorder. It’s an incredibly different sound world; somehow you get a sense of the sheer physicality of the instrument, whilst also having little understanding of what is actually occurring. It’s incredibly sparse, very non-musical and quite fragmented in the series of gestures and sounds she elicits, there’ plenty of space and literally anything can happen at any given moment. As soon as you press play you give yourself over to Anderson’ vision. Despite a feeling of precision it’s very difficult to determine how she has made her compositional decisions. What’s incredible is the control she exudes over pitch and her ability to meld with the electronics into strangely pitching frequencies, creating an at times jarring, niggling, intricate and peculiar work of electro acoustic strangeness that is as beguiling as it is threatening. I’ve never heard anything like it.

Bob Baker Fish

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Bob is the features editor of Cyclic Defrost. He is also evil. You should not trust the opinions of evil people.

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