White Hole States by Hungarian sound artist Akos Garai is a tough album to latch on to: the first couple of times I listened, it seemed to already be over just as it was starting. Totalling seven tracks – simply named States 1-7 – the album is a minimal yet oddly claustrophobic and disconcerting listen at times. It is without many reference points, a combination of real-world sounds and simply-used synthesizers.
Rather than feeling infinite and spacious like a lot of the minimal music I am naturally attracted to, there is something very insular and closed off about this album. It starts off with its most in-your-face piece; sounding like what could be best described as a very digitised cracking of sheets of ice. ‘State 2’ is a very cluttered piece, which sounds like pieces of creaking furniture falling over. ‘State 3’ is full of typewriters and projectors and various other machinery exchanging in a conversation. ‘State 4’ is perhaps the most electronic sounding piece of the album and the closest Garai gets to a noticeable rhythm, with restless pulses and a pizzicato violin. ‘State 5’ is high-pitched whistling feedback, whilst the combination of States 6 and 7 is the best section of the album – with huge bass pulses and barely audible squeaks that sound like dog whistles coupled with an old dialup internet connection or perhaps a Morse key. It’s a pretty insular, suffocating piece – almost scary in how isolating it sounds.
If all this sounds weird, that’s because, well, it is. Each track is definitely a disparate, separate entity in this album – there is no clear path through them, yet it has obviously been sequenced very thoughtfully and deliberately. It is at times disorienting and foreboding, and at others sterile and calm. I’m not exactly sure what emotional and physical space one would have to be in to really connect with this album, but it’s a pretty interesting one nevertheless. The time that I found myself being able to connect the most with it was when I was playing it through my headphones on my lunch break in my office job. I found it oddly rewarding to focus intently on something so demanding that refreshed my mind ready for the rest of the day’s tasks. It’s by no means a sonically pleasing album, but I can see myself returning to it given the right circumstances.
Wyatt Lawton-Masi
