Promotion, originally released in 2000, cradles within it a nest of germinal ideas – an array of points of departure and areas of potential experimentation that Darren Tate, with the aid of Colin Potter and Daisuke Suzuki, would later pursue and, to some extent, see through to fruition through efforts on labels such as Die Stadt and Anomalous Records.
The gestural fullness, tonal flirtation and ambiguity that would later come to play a prominent part in Tate’s recordings, is here all but eclipsed by an approach that is content to stir and stroke the music’s surface, rippling its sheets of metallic sound with dots of micro-details (clicks, scrapes, squeaks) and looped phrases, which allow some simple patterns to establish themselves from the otherwise relentless mode of self-destructing noise.
It’s all very tight and concentrated; the piece standing out as a workout that grates restlessly at the listeners nerve endings. A blurring or fusion of most any sort is largely avoided. Indeed, were it not for the noise drone undertow the work would be less linear, more episodic. While always leaning toward the latter, the piece does to a certain extent maintain a sort of tense middle-ground between the two, full of curls, points and slashes, calligraphic gestures and assorted debris, which make for intriguing singular events, while at the same time being led into oblique modes of continuity by a low thrumming drone, whose pitch sounds almost expressive against such rough tonalities. The albums lure rests in this reversibility – in the intricate, nearly organic manner of its unfolding industrial environment, and the cold, brutal qualities of the natural elements housed within it.
Max Schaefer
