Leeds based artist Oliver Thurley’ project, Ithaca Trio, became a duo in 2011, up one member from the previously solo trio. Already fiction and deception cross paths as the mask of constructive identity becomes as much a real as the original reference which begins the form. Such statements are not out of place in the art of sampling. Thurley has made sound collage an artform processing “compositions, soundscapes, improvisations, field recordings, manipulations and experimentations’. No different is this two track album of tracks recorded in 2009 which consist of piano and reel to reel manipulations by Thurley and mastering by Ian Hawgood.
It appears at first deceptively to be a minimalist piano performance piece and then slight distortions and time displacements set it. It could have been something else that gave rise to the distortion but the hiss and crackle give it away. So you are there launching on the first of these two tracks that last over half an hour each reconciling yourself to the impossible piano reconstructions that are loops, not splices leading your ear in a seductively impossible performance. It’s quite a skill to make it seem almost natural or composed, while highlighting the artifice and placing the construction in plain sight, and yet still fooling the mind into accepting it as natural. Then the modulation kicks in and the chair is kicked out from our imaginings.
The project is described more poetically on the Fluid Radio site, but they, like Home Normal, after all have self interest in creating attraction and the benefit of having made all of their life into an artform, a long form poem to the listening world who can but take notes and give a secondary account. The first track Lepidoptera, pt ii garners layers of subtle noise and sheer volume of loops to form in a very subtle way a subdued cacophony that really seems like an impossible piano piece accompanied by psychiatric medication. In a good way. The second track, weighing in at 35.15 min, Just Skin, is a more languorous piece with distortions extending the tones and a slight high tone being sculptured out of some part of the tape loops, becoming a focus, and almost drone motif. When eventually the piece does reach a denser area, it is akin to a concentrated choral drone, with wonky piano loops, and a high tone loop, fading in then out. Towards the end this gives way to a denser, deeper darker denouement which may resonate with the experienced.
Innerversitysound
