Damian Valles – Nonparallel (In Four Movements) (Experimedia)

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Damian Valles’s Nonparallel (In Four Movements), “is composed and arranged entirely from samples from the recordings of avant-garde Western classical composers and computer music released by the Nonesuch label in the ’60s and ’70s.” This introduction had me thrilled, expecting something akin to Ekkehard Ehlers’s Betrieb of 2000, one of the few releases by Mille Plateaux to attempt to put their deconstructionist rhetoric into practice, and among my favourite ever albums. Instead we get another slice of amorphous abstract wash, overprocessed indeterminate din which could just as well be sourced from Mancini, Miles Davis, Madonna or Mozart.

The music isn’t awful in itself, gritty, stuttery whorls of glitch, hiss and reverb, reminiscent of a more violent Philip Jeck. Jeck however, like Ehlers, celebrates his source material, allowing fragments and loops to appear, naked and untreated but for the layer of dust and gouge of old needles. Valles spent three years obscuring his sources. Taken from vinyl, record static is the most recogniseable feature, and it’s anyone’s guess what recordings were used, let alone what instruments. It could be woodwinds and strings that introduce the second movement, but these are soon obliterated by skittering low end and granular noise. The third sets up an attractive Gas-like drone only to vanish beneath industrial grind and clang, ending with what might be flutes. These brief snatches are Nonparallel‘s finest moments, so perhaps Valles could issue a (p)remix of the work, and reveal what might have been.

Joshua Meggitt

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