sillage .......

"Certainly amongst our most challenging releases, Sillage is the mind-blowing collaboration of Brendan Murray and Seth Nehil and is the result of a first meeting in a live setting from 2004, a performance that was loud, powerful, and very successful. This event combined with knowing these electronic sound artists previous work as generally maximalist and full makes Sillage both curious and nearly shocking in this light, as here the material is continually turning inward, trying to push out but always being submerged. This document takes many, many listens and can remain baffling and impenetrable. Yet with patience one does get underneath it, and once this happens the sonic rewards are otherworldly and deep. Followers of either or both artists work should recognize his particular contributions but this venture has provoked new and uncharted territory from both."
- Rob Forman, Sedimental Records

In 2003, Howard Stelzer suggested that we play together for the Intransitive Music Festival in Boston. We knew and admired each other's work, and jumped at the chance to collaborate. Our one concern was to break from an obvious merging of styles, to avoid the heavy, drone-based structures that would seem to be a natural choice. We exchanged a few cdrs of source material through the mail, but avoided discussion on how the sounds would be manipulated, concentrating on field recordings, random "silences" and fragmentary electronics.
For this set, we agreed on some basic structural rules - most importantly, "No Fades". We arranged a table full of cd players, mini-discs, cassette decks and samplers. Murray could extract and re-introduce material at any point. This was to be a first meeting - no rehearsals. We had a short soundcheck which showed us a direction within moments. We explored cutting as a rhythmic element, and treated recordings as instruments, chopping and darting. The feeling was immediate, risky and loud.
Six months later, we played again at Richard Garet's Nisus Series in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. No rules this time, only a memory of the previous set and an idea that those two instances might speak to each other. Again we focused on field recordings, but this time the structures were slower, more extended, diffuse.
The recordings of those two improvised concerts became the working material for an extended dialogue of editing and re-composition. As we moved forward, we discovered we both wanted to include instrumental sounds. Toying with musicality, Nehil introduced upright bass, plucked strings and incidental notes while Murray went back to playing drums for the first time in ten years.
This collaboration pushed us to create something that sounds little like anything we have made before on our own. Sillage is what is left behind, the wake of our temporary meeting. It's not an easy record. It could have been two or three records. We plan to make more.
- S.N. & B.M., 2007

Sillage are a duo comprised of American sound artists Brendan Murray and Seth Nehil, and this, their first CD, relies heavily on material recorded during two performances in 2003 and 2004. Nehil has released dozens of small (sometimes miniscule) edition CDRs (sic), and in his means (and aesthetic) he’s an eclecticist. Murray can be described as more of an electronicist, but again he’s not easy to pin down. The basso profundo, unstable drone kicking of “ebb/cess”, the CD’s first track, is a bit misleading. The listener is led to expect a slow enrichment or unfolding of material, but almost immediately the sonic ground shifts and gives way to field recordings of a somewhat ambiguous nature.
The tracks are mostly brief, hence uncharacteristic of fully improvised (which these almost certainly are) performances, suggesting that only excerpts from lengthier pieces have been used, but that merely serves to focus attention on the presentation of the material. There’s a shapeliness that’s unusual in abstract music of this kind, and no matter how fractured, layered or collage-like the sounds become, they always seem to fit the immediate purpose, the requirements of the composition, and the trajectory of the music on the CD as a whole. In fact, the way the pieces fit together and imply a sonic ‘narrative’ is extremely pleasing. The final track, “waving”, ends as the CD begins, with a drone, but here Murray (who’s known for this kind of thing) and Nehil make the most of it. Sillage is, in other words, a hugely satisfying piece of work.
- Brian Marley, The Wire 285, November 2007

Sillage comes from two of the most interesting sound sculptors in North America, whose contrasting styles (Brendan Murray’s rich and fulsome, Seth Nehil’s more spare and dry) make this a promising summit. It’s comprised of material culled from several live dates and reassembled with an incredible dynamic range and an unpredictable musical imagination. It opens with a harmonically rich dronescape that slowly evolves, with what I think is a distant minor third settling over a pedal point, all the while suspended amidst a sound like magnetic tape being sucked and mangled. But soon a pinwheel occurs (such shifts are frequent, but not flashy or demonstrative) and an entirely new image emerges, a dense and dry-sounding room with metal cans, bowed hubcaps, and soft wet noises. Machinery comes to life amidst detuned piano strings. Whew. There’s a lot going on here, clearly, and each listen to these pieces yields a fascinating new detail or point of focus: the long cymbal and gong reverberation on “underneath a portrait” is fascinating, as are the soft echoes from a distant struck bell on “feet wrap around chair” (after which it sounds like one is slowly entering a chatty cathedral before abruptly closing the door and exiting again). Seldom is music in this idiom so warm, personable, imaginative and lively.
- Jason Bivins, Signal To Noise #48 Winter 2008

Gaspingly looking for a virtual box to file this recording in, I remained unsuccessful even after the second and third listens, becoming seriously convinced that there is no real chance of achieving the goal. Brendan Murray and Seth Nehil are mostly considered for their work with, respectively, “long form dense compositions of pure sound” and “multi-speaker installations” besides being acknowledged for clever contributions to various types of scene. “Sillage”, though, will surprise in different ways, especially because it features environments and settings nearer to acousmatic music than loop-and-drone-based soundscapes, despite flourishing from the seeds of what the two artists have been doing throughout their career. This doesn’t mean that de-structured field recordings and smog-smelling repetition are absent: there are indeed thick layers of that kind of colouring, but Murray and Nehil worked a real lot on a factor that elevates these eight pieces to the highest level of aural gratification, spelled “dynamics”. Abrupt changes, imperceptible pulses, awesome imagery and secret codes are sapiently mixed with the unsophisticated biotic qualities of natural timbres and that omnipresent metropolitan aroma which makes one feel lost in an unfamiliar soundtrack. Electroacoustic sceneries crossing the hubbub of a shopping mall and the invisible-yet-audible movements of a set of turbines get entwined with threatening passages full of harsher details and ever-growing sense of doubt. Saving the best for last, the authors drill the final track “Waving” into our cerebrum through a scary juxtaposition of sources whose mass - first scarcely mobile, then continuously morphing in panic-eliciting growth - looks for us, positioned womb-like in the tiny hole of presumption, to finally submerge a useless corporeal entity by enhancing the absence of relevance that paralyzes many people and, instead, is the basis of a primary principle of existence that they still refuse to accept. This impenetrability might leave many receivers puzzled in mental standstill, but hopefully someone’s willing to start the process all over again. If this is not a masterpiece, we’re very close. (PS: it’s Seth NEHIL, not “Nihil”…)
- Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes (spazioinwind.libero.it)

There's a song on Sillage (Sedimental) by Brendan Murray & Seth Nehil called "Runs Toward Needles" which sounds like someone looking in a closet full of percussion and brass instruments and never being able to find what they want. The title "Runs Toward Needles" in some way represents the artwork a bit, what looks like a bunch of little lines scribbled as if it's a fabric, thumb print, or a tree limb, but up close at 200x. It is this burst of confusion that may make you want to understand Sillage, but don't look to understand. Look to listen, and listen to observe.
Both Murray and Nehil bring in found sounds and create them at the same time, and combine them every now and then to make sounds that could be the source of sound effects to a bizarre film of submarine dynamics. In a piece like "Clothes Tear" one doesn't hear clothes or tearing. For the first half of the sound you hear a lot of electronics twisting and turning to be heard, and then it heads underwater, maybe to find that sonic submarine. Then with perfect timing, something begins to rise. At least that's my interpretation of it, and in truth it's nothing more than collaborative sounds that make an effort to speak to each other while having its own voice be heard and known.
The 8-track album has to be heard in full from start to finish, since some tracks contradict each other in sound, sometimes they contradict within the same track. One part may sound bright and open as if it's some vehicle riding on the beach as water comes to shore, and then you're in outer space. I go back to the needle theory, and perhaps that if there is some sense of logic to this, the needle has to be found. But perhaps the portrait Murray and Nehil are trying to present is about all of the needles, and that if you're going to dive in, you'll bleed a lot. If you venture in, bring rubbing alcohol.
- John Book (therunoffgroove.blogspot.com)

Both Seth Nehil and Brendan Murray have a vast catalogue behind their names of both solo works and collaborative ones. Together they have worked since 2003, when they played a set together at the Intransitive festival and then later some more in New York. Much of what they did together is at the basis of this disc. They have a strong interest in both field recordings and computer processings thereof. It's hard to tell from these eight pieces what is what, but it seems obvious that things work alongside eachother. Especially Murray's work in this field is great (and much underrated). Controlled atmospheric electric charges, contact microphones scratching the surface and plug ins constantly rework what is on hand, and the result is a densely knitted field of work. Perhaps obvious work in the field of microsound, phonography and such like, but this is a great recording, as far as I'm concerned.
- Frans de Waard (Vital Weekly)

Sillage stands as a near impenetrable domain. It's interplanetary baubles and esoteric tinsel, set in motion a search for minute shifts in the texture of sound, changing relationships between chance and composition, and in so doing, emphasize the importance of listening, as an all-consuming mode of awareness.
The challenge is an immediate one, one that is festive and fatal, and so before the listener is able to gain a sense of the surroundings, he or she is all but required to offer an investment of a personal sort, if the albums malevolent residues aren't to fester like a wound. Murray and Nehil provide a massive architecture for rude bursts of electronics and metal scrapes, so large, in fact, that as time rubs up against its gnarled body, it is reduced to slow motion. To be sure, the structure is not one of mere cacophonous crackle. To the contrary, the rasping metallic textures, pockets of junk, and cavernous reverberations, though rarely escaping a buzz saw volatility, arc steadily in and out and remain within a guided sense of proportion.
The feverish energy suggests a desire to explode, to get out, yet the album continually turns in on itself and licks its own scabs. Clothes Tear, for example, features an agitated drone setting off distant blasts, which merely come to puncture its own noxious cloud, creating breaches or empty spaces which gape like open wounds. This incessant inward knawing is also conveyed by frail, flapping rhythms, which rise against a grounded hiss like a moth's wings beating against a glass it will never break. In the end, Sillage is a violent but controlled implosion, and an enveloping one at that.
- Max Schaefer (furthernoise.org)

What a glorious pile of junk being kicked around a room. More abstracter-than-thou kitchen sinkonica from the folks over at Sedimental, Sillage features Brendan Murray and Seth Nehil. Anyone can drink a pot of coffee, get bored and record himself rubbing a piece of machinery or coaxing alien tones from whatever is lying around. Unfortunately, a lot of the time that’s exactly what makes it onto record and into my mailbox. But the duo of Sillage has put together eight pieces that will disorient and possibly harm you, but you’ll do what you so rarely do in the genre of avant-garde: listen again. There’s a immediacy throughout this album, and damn it if Nehil and Murray don’t find a way to make these tracks actual songs. They’d never admit it though, but a thread runs through the album. A few of the tracks utilize live material recorded by Keith Fullerton Whitman, and those hipster points are earned here. “Clothes Tear” is comprised of I really have no idea what, but I could make up stuff like snapping fingers, a refrigerator hum and wind recorded through a Zack Morris cell phone. “Underneath a Portrait” is a violent tunnel of rushing sound that somehow approaches powerful beauty before tapering into calm. The second part of “Wake of Scent” sounds like Merzbow if he’d grow up and do something different. None of the tones in the piece are pretty, exactly, and they’re all just noise, but this is beyond a handy label like noise. In fact, this might be the only record I’ve ever heard constructed primarily of unidentifiable sound sources that could be released on a label like Kranky. Anyone who’s curious about the farther reaches of the abstract spectrum should seek this out immediately. It’s not often you can listen to music like this and drift off, and that’s an impressive feat.
- Michael Wehunt (Foxy Digitalis)

Q. If you could recommend the perfect place and time to listen to Sillage, what would they be?
I don’t know about a place - I suppose the proverbial easy chair in front of two very nice speakers. Or laying in the dark with headphones. I think - because of all the details in this music - that Sillage lends itself well to careful listening.

Q. If Sillage were to become the soundtrack of a short film, what do you think the film would be about?
One of the reasons I’m interested in making abstract music is because it doesn’t have to be “about” anything to still be evocative in a different way for each listener. I think that a film “about” something would be a distortion of the intent in this album. In fact, I wouldn’t really pursue any image accompanyment. However, to answer your question in a different way, I could imagine a visual and textural image equivalent to the sound - short sharp bursts of colorful moments with a grainy, degraded quality.

Q. What environment were you in when you recorded these pieces and what do you think were the elements in your surroundings that caused the album to sound the way it does?
Well, many many environments became embedded in this material. First there are the environments where various sound sources were recorded: a forbidding concrete courtyard on the campus of MassArt, the busy lobby of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the hull of a boat in a small pond in New Hampshire, a quiet wooden room in a friend’s house in Washington, and many others. And then there was the auditorium in Boston where we improvised and recorded the first of the two concerts we played, and the small club in Brooklyn where we improvised and recorded the second concert. The live situation led to a sense of urgency and a structural instability, as we challenged each other to keep changing and responding. This was probably the most important factor in the end result. Finally, there were the various rooms and studio situations where these sources and live recordings were chopped into bits, reordered, composed and de-composed.
I guess this work is not so much a portrait of a place or places (or anything else for that matter), but more a work in which glimpses and fleeting moments from a wide variety of conflicting spaces overlap and collide.