There’s one aspect of electronic music production that has long annoyed me and that is the use of deliberately painful high pitched sounds for prolonged periods of time. Platform (Matthew Atkins) opens his album Distanced with 3 minutes of the most alienating high pitch sitting above the background texture. It’s unfortunate because every time I listen to the album it puts me in a negative frame, undermining much of the excellent sounds that follow. I normally end up fast forwarding through the section and then feel I’m not being fully immersed in the work.
What follows it is actually quite good. Simple textures and ambient sounds are processed without ending up sounding overly digitised. As the ear tunes in to the various timbres, very recognisable sounds emerge – a flittering typewriter, a modem connection, crinkling paper. A nice balance is developed between expansive backgrounds and intimate foregrounds. As the half hour of music across the disc evolves, a definite arc can be traced as proceedings become quieter and quieter and the listener is drawn in to a more active role. Sounds are stripped to bare particles, gently flowing across the stereo spectrum.
I’ve taken to listening to this disc without its first 3 minutes. While the overall scheme of the recording – a gradual shift from aggressive alienation to intimate caressing – makes sense of the initial piercing, it’s hard for all the warmth of the latter half of the disc to coax me out of the bad mood that one sound can put me in. Without it I can enjoy the entire journey much more effectively.
Adrian Elmer
