Through these Landscape Studies, Asher takes interest in the unique sound properties of interior spaces. Although the home or dwelling breaks from the plenum of the element, Asher doesn’t view it as simply a utopia for reflection and recollection, but as an ambiguous setting, both visible and invisible, removed and connected from the inclemencies of weather and other threats, human or otherwise. As an effectuation of this interior environment, with its own energy, warmth and gentleness of intimacy, the work is wholly successful.
The pieces are slow and relentless, drifting along like a pressurized breath system, out of which all manner of obtuse observations, scraps of notes, frazzled field recordings, and unidentifiable, reverberating noises arise, consolidating them as singular, absorbing spaces.
Inasmuch as the pieces do bleed into one another and engender a strong hypnotic state, there nonetheless remains a plurality of elements that, particularly when listened to on headphones, may often be heard shifting and communicating like masks to create a charged memory space. It is doubtlessly one of Asher’s more unified and complete efforts. In settling upon sounds of the interior, he secures a salient perspective from which to display the world, and all of the ways in which it escapes, is enlisted, and enjoyed in that valiant vestibule, the home.
Max Schaefer
