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Dusted Reviews
Artist: Organ Eye Album: Organ Eye Label: Staubgold Review date: Apr. 27, 2007 |
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It’s tempting to view Organ Eye as an electronic-acoustic drone summit. The quartet comprises David Maranha and Patricia Machás of Osso Exotico, a long-lived Portuguese outfit with minimalist tendencies and a fondness for organs and acoustic strings, and New Zealand-born world travelers Jasmine Guffond and Torben Tilly of Minit, who quite sensibly confine their instrumentation to easily packed electronic gear.
But the production of their collective sound is less important than its arrangement and manipulation. The album features two tracks whose duration in the lower 20s suggests that someone in Organ Eye fondly remembers the LP; there is, in fact, a small vinyl pressing of this record available to those who are well connected and fast acting. Each progresses slowly, and if regarded from a distance seems as blank and unyielding as the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Close listening reveals a different story; this music actually teams with detail, it’s apparent solidity the result of glare thrown off by agitated activity. But the detail comes on slowly, accumulating density like a swiffer plowing across some cat lady’s long-unswept wooden floor. “Tema #1” opens serenely enough, with tiny consonant tones stitched around a swell of bowed piano strings. But then some looped clatter — a cassette deck kicking into action, perhaps? — pokes out of the dronescape and the music banks left and up, ascending towards a big beam of feedback.
On “Tema #2,” the sounds really begin to dance. Overdriven organ and harmonium wheeze in and out of phase with each other like a couple early Terry Riley recordings, around which layers of pixilated sonic glitter flicker like an aura around some celestial body. Like a long look at the sun, the longer you squint, the less clear it all becomes.
By Bill Meyer
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