Melbourne-based electronic producer / sound designer Ross Healy has been actively involved in the international electronic scene since the early nineties, having previously released tracks ranging from ambience through to techno and drum and bass under a long list of aliases, including This Digital Ocean, 56k, Horaku and Amnesia. While he’s previously explored more dance-based styles in the past however, these days Healy is mainly focused more on improv / experimental electronics, with his more abstracted and minimalist Cray persona being introduced with his 2001 debut album ‘Undo’ for the French Bip-hop label. Curiously, this second album ‘Water Computing’ on Healy’s own Vicmod label was actually originally recorded around the same time as ‘Undo’, but was only recently re-discovered by Healy on a disused hard drive is his basement that had been gathering dust for the past eight years. Given the abstracted and austere nature of the eleven tracks collected here however, the ensuing years have done little to perceptibly date ‘Water Computing’s contents. Indeed, it’s fair to say that this album is easily one of the more abstracted and sometimes forbidding collections of ambient / experimental electronics I’ve reviewed for this magazine – listening to these often airless-sounding landscapes, Healy’s accompanying description of a conceptual future where all humans have vanished makes perfect sense.
Opening track ‘1strac’ kicks proceedings off comparatively gently, building gauzy ambience as a trail of crackling static rolls beneath blurred-sounding analogue synth tones that sudden drop in and out and tweaked harmonics that almost sound like drastically treated voice at points, but from there on the more unsettling elements begin to rise to the surface as ‘Bluzzz’ sends vast buzzsaw blasts of industrial noise roaring out beneath a tense backdrop of urgent machine bleeps and rattling digital processing, the entire atmosphere calling to mind hundreds of robots working silently around a huge sawmill. ‘Bio Feds’ also proves to be a similarly uneasy listen as processed digital error noise rattles and buzzes between the speakers whilst being sent corkscrewing through some seriously headspinning DSP manipulation, while ‘Pgs’ sees the persistent listener being rewarded as the opening salvo of piercing treble tones begins to recede into a queasy wash of seemingly random synth tones and rumbling noise drones that’s punctuated with scraping treated tones and the odd sudden jagged white noise burst. If Healy’s self-stated aim with ‘Water Computing’ was to fashion an audio landscape seemingly devoid of any recognisably ‘human’ presence, then he’s certainly succeeded here.
Chris Downton
