stria / confluence

John Grzinich and Seth Nehil's Confluence (Intransitive) does one thing over its three tracks and does it gloriously. Even without reading inside the "exponential variation....revealed (in a non-linear fashion)", the thick syrup slowly oozing from the speakers is a shifting mass of hundreds of layers of smaller sound nuggets. In both "Pneuma" and Lohme" individual characteristics of the sources are unrecognizable, congealing instead into gargantuan whooshes which flow like the circulatory system of Antione de Sainte-Expurery's mammoth snake digesting an elephant."The Distant Edge", the best and shortest track, uses field recordings from a demonstration in Belgrade, and the clamor of car horns and machinery remains more apparent than in the other songs. (songs?) The honks, shouts, and clangs are folded in upon themselves to the point of completely obscuring any relation to a field recording, resembling instead a discontented angelic choir singing hymns to passerby trying desperately to carry on their business in exaggerated oblivion.
- Alesandro Moreschi III, Bananafish #17

Released at the same time as jgrzinich and Seth Nehil's Stria (that one on the Belgian label Erewhon), Confluence presents three more electro-acoustic pieces resulting from their collaborations between 1998 and 2000. Their stated intent was to "study evolutionary patterns of sound dynamics through various methods of live generation and recorded mediums that focus on multiplications and groupings." In other words, the interaction and resonance taking place between smaller parts of a greater whole — a sound organism of sorts. These pieces involved a long process of gathering sound sources which included the use of group recording participants reacting to sounds played to them by playing themselves (on small percussion instruments and objects like bowls). This is an interesting concept, but you can choose to ignore it all and just listen. Each piece contains layer upon layer of sounds moving at different paces, creating rich but not too dense textures that allow you to focus on a different "region" of the sonic space each time you press the play button. Somewhere between musique concrète and very detailed drones, the music opens up and sucks you in. Both artists collected the material, but Jgrzinich composed "Pneuma" and "Lohme," two 20-minute pieces, leaving the 5-minute "The Distant Edge" as Nehil's sole contribution (the situation is reversed on Stria). The latter piece features car horns and other street sounds that make it sound more aggressive than the other two, so it works as a kind of interlude between JGrzinich's quasi-ambient pieces. In its last minutes, "Lohme" threatens to turn into one of Francisco Lopez's sound constructions. Recommended.
- François Couture, AMG (All-Music Guide)

Stria is the counterpart to Confluence, which is credited to jgrzinich & Seth Nehil and was released simultaneously on the Intransitive label. The first two pieces have been composed by Nehil from recordings by both artists and by participants in a group recording laboratory where non-musicians were instructed to respond to source material by playing simple household objects. ‘Tome Gather’ (20 minutes) takes the form of a rather static drone, gentle and warm. It sounds like an orchestra of bowed wires (I9m reminded of Stephen Froylek’s stringed bathtub). ‘Arboreal’ (eight minutes and a half) is percussion based, but despite the different sound palette, dynamics remain limited and once again individual contributions are meshed into a highly cohesive group sound. Stereo separation in this piece is very wide, offering many details to focus your attention on. The third and last piece, ‘The Mirrored Corner’ (16 minutes) is credited to John Grzinich with additions by Nehil. It consists of a dense, multi-layered assemblage of wire drones taken from the duo’s 1999 Biotope Installation in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Much more dynamic, it feels like an orchestra of tides, ebbs and flows beating against each other. The metallic nature of the wires translates into a shimmering, glass-like soundscape that stands as the highlight of Stria and Confluence combined.
- François Couture, AMG (All-Music Guide)

These two cd’s were released and intended to accompany each other, one on the Belgian Erewhon label, and one on the American Intransitive label. Both cd’s contain 3 long tracks. The presented tracks reflect a collaboration between Seth Nehil and John Grzinich, who are perhaps better known as the group Alial Straa. The collaboration uses recordings of found objects, which were played by large groups of people, and which were manipulated in the studio afterwards. This gives both cd’s a very ‘concrete’ atmosphere. The sounds are best described as huge drones, or vibrations which form very long and evolving pieces. This makes the music very organic and natural.
A lot of concrete artists feel the need to be very wild and expressive in their use of sound. Seth Nehil and John Grzinich use a more meditative and static approach. The sounds just keep flowing on and on, and changes occur very subtly. This does not mean the tracks are uninteresting in any way, actually it makes the tracks very exciting and nice to listen to. Somehow, because of it’s slow evolution, the tracks are really intense and beautiful.
Overall two very nicely done works, which come highly recommended if you like subtle ‘natural’ drone music like Francisco Lopez, Hazard, Small Cruel Party, or Toy Bizarre.
- http://www.funprox.com/judgment/review

Seth Nehil and John Grzinich are electroacoustic musicians with a wide range of performance and recording experience. For stria, the duo collected a number of people to perform "location specific recordings with found objects." The results were then subjected to a variety of layerings and sonic modifications.
The longest piece, the twenty minute "Tome Gather", starts softly and builds to a great, machinery like texture of drones. Picture Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but with relatively no interest in pitch. "Arboreal", clocking in at only 8:30, is more subtle, with gentle rattling of chains and a climax that sounds like something being poured. "The Mirrored Corner" has manufactured wire drones supplied by the Biotope Installation, and reminded me at first of the sound of far off planes flying overhead, and later of the distant post-midnight jack-hammering I have been hearing in town, way past the railroad tracks, down by the bay...and always when I am trying to sleep. The dynamic intensity of the drones builds and recedes, creating formal blocks using sheer sonic density.
It's difficult to rate "The Top Ten location specific recordings with found objects of all time;" this kind of music doesn't lend itself to easy qualitative categorization. If novelty is a virtue that is prized in determining a work's intrinsic value, a yardstick that I think has been overused, then I can't say that these two fellows have come up with many noises that seem new. However, if you want to hear two dedicated electroacoustic artists creating some interesting sound sculptures, this might be up your alley.
- http://www.splendidezine.com/review.html?reviewid=3260364795246848

Confluence is a companion to another Grzinich/Nehil collaboration that I recently reviewed, Stria. Like it, Confluence consists of electronic treatments of group performances on different instruments and objects. Rather than the faux "Found Art Objects" of the Ghost World film, the materials implemented by the performers seem to gel quite well on both Grzinich/Nehil recordings, leading me to believe that careful thought has gone into their selection.
There are two largish pieces here, "Pneuma" and "Lohme", and one that comes in at around five minutes, "The Distant Edge". Of these, "The Distant Edge" is easily, if you'll pardon the pun, the most edgy -- the sounds range from subdued murmurs to urban street noise in full throttle, heavy on the car horns.
While I admire Nehil and Grzinich for their sense of purpose in creating a unified corpus of work, their kind of ambient music leaves me feeling, in a physical sense, very different from the other ambient pieces I've heard recently (Kobi, LaMonte Young, Robert Poss). The other artists have had a salutary effect on my constitution, leaving me refreshed after listening to their works; not so Confluence . Maybe in their eagerness to create something more out of their collection of sounds, Nehil and Grzinich have selected a path of electronic manipulation that has added a bit too much edge to their tones. As engaging as I find their material to be, I get a bit of a low grade headache each time I put it on. But maybe it's just me; let me know how Confluence leaves you.
- Christian Carey

'Pneuma', the first of the three tracks on Confluence, sounds like an empty beer can rolling down the gutter in a thunderstorm. The second, 'The Distant Edge', sounds like the evening rush hour in a Mediterranean city (although it's actually partially constructed from a recording of a demonstration in Belgrade). The last, 'Lohme', is the abrasive shimmer of the noonday sun on a mass of concrete and metal. Resonance is the thing, humming and throbbing, swimming through the air towards us, and this is further demonstrated on the companion disc, Stria, which opens with the eerie whistling drone of 'Tome Gather', moves on the snap and rustle of 'Arboreal', and concludes with 'The Mirrored Corner', a Night Passage type expedition into migraine territory, tooled up with wire drones from an installation supplied by the Slovenian Ministry of Experiment, no less. Seth Nehil and John Grzinich have been collaborating since 1994, when they formed the electroacoustic ensemble Alial Straa, and they collaborate to good effect here in both discs. I have no idea why these excellent explorations of natural vibration have been released simultaneously on different labels, because they clearly belong together. Of the two I just about prefer the darker side of Stria, but both are pretty essential additions to the record collection of anybody who appreciates heavily manipulated and layered natural sound, where individual contribution to the resulting whole is crushed to oblivion, and what is left is a profound sense of unease.
- Flux Europa

The 2 sound explorers Seth Nehil and John Grzinich work together under the name Alial Straa since 1994. The starting point of their journey in the electroacoustic/concrete world was and is Austin/TX, references going in mnortham's direction, with acoustic projects erg and orogenetics.
Nehil (73) and Grzinich (70) played with a set of musicians from their region, all devoted to the discovery of sound circumstances. The settings, with field recordings, old reel to reel and digital processing are supposed wellknown; their generally 20 minutes long ambient/drones alone are sufficient to put the listener in a suspension state.
Confluence on Intransitive, US label known for their superb sounddesigns, is an irruption into a microscopique texture of elementary particles in a aggregate state in permanent mutation. The middle of the record, with its disorganised car horn orgy, makes an exception and breaks the spherical nature of the piece. It's about the recording of a demonstration in Belgrade in sept 1999.
Stria is so to speak confluence's alter ego. Music is also meant as a complex linking of sonic particles, the movie-head of the fieldrecording is in a perpetual rotation. Stria may take a more electronic direction, but it's not that easy to say. Everything is in permanent flow, a maehlstrom in other zones of consciousness.
Both CDs come in a very nice design, the text material is worth reading, exactly what you need while a simultaneous listening to live an "all in all" experience. The theoretical concept af a "Sound body" is included.
- Stewart Gott, Skug, June 2003

With the proliferation of amazing software packages and ever more powerful machines, making electronic music today is, in theory, easier than it ever has been, and the recent slew of unimpressive (to say the least) remix albums seems to be depressing proof that increased sophistication of resources has not always led to a corresponding raising of the stakes when it comes to quality. It's comparatively rare to find composers of electronic music who are prepared to really take their time in working and reworking their sonic material, which makes these two exceptional companion albums by Seth Nehil and John Grzinich, one on the Belgian label Erewhon, the other on Howard Stelzer's Boston-based Intransitive imprint even more worthy of your attention.
Using sound material sourced from various objects played (Nehil prefers the word "manipulated") by large groups of people, the two composers "trade, treat and trade" sounds again until, as Nehil writes, "because of the very long composition time (more than two years) it becomes impossible to claim ownership." Rather than trying to fit their material into a pre-conceived architecture, Nehil and Grzinich "allow the sounds to dictate the overall form," and the end-product manages to combine a naturally breathing sense of form (in a manner not dissimilar to much electroacoustic improvisation) with a sound surface of extraordinary precision and complexity ("anywhere from one to over a thousand layers may coexist in any one moment"). Listening through headphones - recommended unless you happen to have a state-of-the-art stereo system and a listening space large enough to enjoy the music at the necessary volume - reveals the extraordinary lengths to which the composers go to interleave, crossmix and develop their sound material. At times the source sounds seem easily identifiable, but once the layers of crackles, rustles and clanging pots and dishes have been superimposed and set back into the middle distance of the mix through masterly and subtle panning, they assume different, multiple identities. What could start out as a gentle tap on a piece of wood ends up as distant thunder - or is it gunfire?
The steady accumulation of sonic events inevitably recalls the stochastic pile-ups of Xenakis, who, you will recall, in his 1966 interview with Marc Blancpain (which accompanies the Fractal reissue of his "Persepolis" - not the shoddy job released by Asphodel last year), explained his interest in mass phenomena as a means to obtain "form, a completely new plastic sonority that no longer behaves according to polyphonic or tonal or serial rules, but rather a completely new concept that can be found in calculating probability, or in theories such as the Kinetic Theory of Gases which [..] plays an important role in astrophysics today." Many composers today pay lip-service to Xenakis while apparently understanding neither the sheer difficulty and complexity of his music nor the compositional strategy behind it (I'm thinking particularly of those who participated in the disappointingly shallow above-mentioned Asphodel Persepolis remix project), but works such as Nehil and Grzinich's "Pneuma" (on "Confluence") and "Arboreal" (on "Stria") are the authentic descendents of "Bohor" and "Concret PH".
" The Distant Edge" (on Confluence) was sourced in recordings of a 1999 street demonstration in Belgrade, and superimposes recognisable sounds of mass protest - blaring car horns, chanted slogans and angry cries - to form a huge pulsing cloud of sound about an octave in range. If Xenakis comes to mind once more (and we should not forget that his experience of public uprising during the occupation of Greece during the war was a formative influence on his concept of mass sound), so at times does mid-period Ligeti (specifically a piece like "Clocks and Clouds") - the music appears to drift by slowly until you focus your attention in on the detail and find it to be teeming with activity like a beehive. Simply put, these two albums contain some of the most technically accomplished and awesomely beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard, as infinitely complex and infinitely simple as light. Any self-respecting new music enthusiast can't afford to pass them by.
- Dan Warburton, paristransatlantic.com, march, 2003

Belle musique de ces deux poètes du sonore qui vont faire résonner leurs drones organiques aux lisières d'un temps immobile. Les mouvements lents de ces sons, comme des coulées épaisses de matières offrent des paysages tendus et étrangement sereins, faits de grincements, de frottements, d'ondes vastes, de résonnances scintillantes, révélant majestueusement dans le temps leurs contours gracieux. On pénètre dans ces flots lourds comme un animal géant, prenant nos aises en se laissant porter par le courant, quittant une certaine pasanteur pour une autre, plus subtile. Le courant nous entraîne dans des cavités obscures, dans des cirques ouverts et gigantesques, d'autres échos apparaissent, habités de fantômes. Dense-musique de déplacement de masses titanesques, on s'y arrête timide et observateur, et au final on n'est pas déçu du voyage.
Beautiful music from these two sound poets who will make their organic drones resonate at the margins of an immobile time. Like thick currents of matter, the slow motions of these sounds offer strained and strangely serene landscapes made from creaking, gratings, broad waves and sparkling resonance majestically uncovering their gracious surroundings in time. You penetrate into this heavy flow like a gigantic animal, taking its ease, letting yourself being taken away by the current, leaving a certain heaviness for another, more subtle. The current takes us into obscure cavities, in the open gigantic pools other echoes appear, inhabited by phantoms. With this dense music of shifting titanic masses you stop, shy, observe and in the end you are not deceived by the voyage.
- Manu Holterbach, revue&corrigée no 54, december 2002

These two cds were released and intended to accompany each other, one on the Belgian Erewhon label, and one on the American Intransitive label. Both cds contain 3 long tracks. The presented tracks reflect a collaboration between Seth Nehil and John Grzinich, who are perhaps better known as the group Alial Straa. The collaboration uses recordings of found objects, which were played by large groups of people, and which were manipulated in the studio afterwards. This gives both cds a very concrete atmosphere. The sounds are best described as huge drones, or vibrations which form very long and evolving pieces. This makes the music very organic and natural.A lot of concrete artists feel the need to be very wild and expressive in their use of sound. Seth Nehil and John Grzinich use a more meditative and static approach. The sounds just keep flowing on and on, and changes occur very subtly. This does not mean the tracks are uninteresting in any way, actually it makes the tracks very exciting and nice to listen to. Somehow, because of its slow evolution, the tracks are really intense and beautiful. Overall two very nicely done works, which come highly recommended if you like subtle natural drone music like Francisco Lopez, Hazard, Small Cruel Party, or Toy Bizarre.
- TD, funprox.com, april, 2003

Stria - layers, the overplaced sounds that make up these compositions; strings, the connections and movements that work through them. In 'Tome gather' for example, both these aspects are heard as the piece elides from: burring tones, modulated tonal metals with longer tones and pulses in there as a hidden music; the burring becomes less pronounced, emergent long drones, dense and gorgeous with a percussive note; becoming more voicelike, edgy high tones; the drones start to diverge, becoming more pulsing and noisey; to an atonal conflict of purer tones that interfere-pulse, disturbed voices. There are no points of change on this journey, more gradual modulations, and layer lays on layer.
Building percussive clicks and clatter in 'Arboreal' are rhythmic, slow washes through, sounds separate and rejoin (stringed together), a rapid flowing, then fluttering to the end.
Finally 'The mirrored corner' is buzzing metallic with a clicky click, shimmering and pulsing; a resonant echo deep emerges and is a dark hollow voice that becomes more voice-like; the middle section simples-out, more clicks. A dominant tone develops, shimmering with a sine pulse and a sequence of melodic ringing tones ebb and flow before a brief climax and fade.
The liner notes suggest Nehil and Grzinich take recordings of large groups (playing who knows what) in the first two tracks, and wire drones in the third, and then 'compose' them. Interestingly Nehil is the credited composer of the first two, Grzinich of the last (with additions by Nehil), and the pieces have taken a number of years to create. There are some liner notes that may help understand their process - there are hints in terms of 'unfocus' and an overseas collaboration - but it is very trendily obscure. Anyway, irrespective of their methods, the results are dramatic e(in)volving minimalist works.
- Jeremy Keens, Ampersand Etcetera, december 2002

Favorites of 2003:
Confluence – Kevin Weinke (Alluvial Recordings)
Confluence - #9 in 2002 Top 10 by Rob Forman, Continuous Drift, WZBC 90.3 FM - Newton, Massachusetts - Boston College

Intransitive Recordings has released one in a pair of discs by John Grzinich and Seth Nehil that explores their prolonged collaboration of the last several years. Confluence opens with an extended, airy drone and a slight whisper that leads into a repeated clanking rhythm that grows until another, deeper drone can supplant the first. Slowly, microorganisms made purely of sound begin to swell and collide as the opening piece, titled "Pneuma" in a vaguely scientific artspeak creates a self-sustaining colony of sounds as beings. Of course, the sound-organisms don't have to abide by the physical laws and social rules that real beings would, and so the analogy ends there. But Grzinich and Nehil have set out to create organic sound systems with Confluence and the differentiation between an organic system and a symbol of one is important. The prose that fills the liner notes is coldly detached as it describes processes, and experiments more than sounds and feelings. Of course, not all music is set to resonate on an emotional level, and "Pneuma" is a good example of that. You can find the structures, observe the growth and be completely involved in listening to the system, but it's not likely to affect you in a personal, emotional way unless you are normally moved by the kind of rigidly scientific approach to the world that this track seems to entail. "The Distant Edge," however, treads a very different terrain that is full of voices and the aural signifiers of human activity. The atonal choral drone that builds with the agitated activity of a beehive is reminiscent of the György Ligeti themes in 2001, and is accompanied by location recordings of crowd noise and honking car horns that evoke the confusion and dissonance of a demonstration in Belgrade. The album's closer, "Lohme" is a fluttering, cyclic drone workout that sees a sonic system in stasis, wrapping around itself in a pulsating whitewash. "Lohme" lacks the tension of "The Distant Edge" and the clinical precision of "Pneuma," but works on it's own as a worthy foray into musical structures that take an almost extreme amount of patience and time to digest. From the pen and ink drawing on the cover to the last fading tones of recorded tones, Confluence is an observable sonic petri dish. Just like looking through a microscope at amorphous shapes colliding in the protoplasm, approaching this record can be difficult and rewarding depending on what you expect to find.
If Confluence, the other half of this duo of releases from Grzinich and Nehil requires patience, then Stria requires downright fortitude. It would be easy to put this record on and go about your day of paying bills, cooking supper, and feining interest in electro acoustic music, but it takes a real will power to dive in and let the slowly moving drones work their magic. Like Confluence, Stria is composed of three tracks: long bookend pieces to start and conclude the album, and a middle piece that is considerably shorter. Here, the middle piece, "Arboreal" personifies its name with the sound of crunching leaves that are the product of a group recording of no less than nine people. The recording and composition are pristine, allowing for a clear mental image of fingers squeezing dried leaves into dust. This may or may not be the actual source of "Arboreal's" sounds, but it is, nevertheless, something tangible and real to hold on to. However, "Arboreal" is the closest anything on the disc comes to sounding like a recording of the natural world, or even an intentionally manipulated sound source. The rest of 'Stria' is contained in long, mesmerizing drones that stretch out at glacial speed as if the recordings themselves had been stretched the distance between Grzinich and Nehil. The 20 plus minute piece, "Tome Gather," has the faintest clicks in the distant background that suggest the presence of a person in the room as the massive swell of humming continues to envelope space. Ambient music (which this is or is not depending on your prefered nomenclature) has often been called sonic wallpaper, but moments here seem less like sound acting as wallpaper than the sound OF wallpaper, amplified a million-fold and played back into a dense reverb chamber. There are long stretches of the album opener, "The Mirrored Corner" that sound like nothing at all is changing, that is, unless you listen carefully and notice that the changes are in fact taking place thousands of times per second as the waveforms crest and pulse to form a continuous, volitile drone. This kind of careful listening, and the cautiously exploratory methods of these composers obviously aren't for everyone, and I've had equal bouts of really appreciating this record and really wondering what, if anything, the sound was there to do. I think the sound is just there because it can be, and there's a beauty in that. stria is a meditation in sound, that compliments its sister recording while managing to sound nothing like it.
- Matthew Jeanes, Brainwashed.com, Feb. 2003

stria is the counterpart to the forthcoming confluence soon to be released by Intransitive Recordings. Erewhon is a Belgian label that has been releasing some extremely essential recordings from PBK, Artificial Memory Trace, Mnortham and Lionel Marchetti. On stria there appears to be a universal presence, a good and evil - almost combined as one. The three long play tracks herein gather multiple layered sources. The overall feel to the disc breathes deeply like the residue of a built and destructed climax of a Philip Glass score. This can eerily be witnessed on 'Tome Gather', a 20 minute sub-symphonic piece that breathes under cover. All practicality aside, the themes in this track are built on an eight year collaborative relationship between Seth Nehil and jgrzinich (John Grzinich). The focus here is certainly resonance, in its intense tonal vibration and chamber of contained sounds. Any assigned structures have been unmasked to mirror their own continuity. The repetitive acoustics beg to be sited, but there is no clear answer to what "instrument" you hear, it is more an ambiguous amalgamation of found objects played by about a dozen participants. The unsettling perpetuity of the work recalls Robert Rich's Sleep Concerts. 'Arboreal' starts as though it were a group survey of the aftermath of a fire still partially ablaze. Its crunchy distortion piles through with a metered speed in a gesture that seems off center yet directional. There is a circular, wind tunnel running through the piece, the sense of the outdoors - I could almost smell rain. Flames lap through an almost silent conclusion to this track, leaving with a work that is punctuated in mystery. About four years in the making, stria (and confluence) are works of organic growth for these artists. A true collaboration that bends whatever rules would necessitate such meaningful relationships in sound space. 'The Mirrored Corner' uses wire drones from the Biotope installation that was shown at the Kapelica Galerija in Slovenia. The constant winding, buzzing, drone builds and retreats and repeats with a weary statement of entrapment and vaporization. There is a reflective caution to this final track, one that speaks of voids and validity, a strict balance of finite realities.
- TJ Norris, SoundVision, July 2002

This release is not really very fresh, but only arrived after I reviewed it's counterpart Confluence on Intransitive Recordings, which was reviewed in Vital Weekly 353. Grzinich and Nehil work together since 1994 as Alial Straa, with various people, like Olivia Block (apart from collaborations with others and solo work). Like Confluence we are offered three lengthy pieces of drone music. In the first two pieces they work together with a large group of people producing resonating sounds, which were afterwards retransformed in the studio. There the final work was conceived, by transformating and layering of the sounds. The results are thick masses of music, which in 'Tome Gather' reminded me of Cornelius Cardew's 'The Great Learning' (less the whispering voices). A massive choir of sounds, rich of humming sounds of a hard to define nature - voices, sounds, electronics? Who knows? The second group piece 'Arboreal' is more crackling, of sounds being played by rubbing them, scratching etc. The use of reverb on the individual sounds, gives a droning effect. 'The Mirrored Corner' is a strict drone piece, which include wire drones from 'the biotope installation'. Here the pure drones work best, and remind me of the best Alan Lamb work. Together with Confluence this makes a fine overview of their joint work.
- Franz DeWard, Vital Weekly

Another brilliant addition of cds that really amazed me this month, was the recent seth nehil /jgrzinich : stria on erewhon label. Being the counterpart of confluence which is soon to be released on the us intransitive label is a recording consisting mostly of recording done between 98-00 that were later mixed for the release. In the case of the first 2 (out of the 3 that are included) with the additional recordings of various friends such as michael northam, josh ronsen to name only but a couple. And is a release that I believe will suit best to people who like a lot obscure drones or even allow me to say more “installation” like sounds in some cases. Making it definitely an outstanding listening experience, especially if you’re into organum, michael northam or already familiar w/ seth nehil & jgrzinich’s previous recorded documents as well.
- http://www.anet.gr/absurd/

Qusto CD fa parte della categoria "File under: uneasy-no guts no glory-listening", quindi se avete nervi saldi, non fate uso di sostanze psicotrope troppo potenti e vi va di provare qualcosa di "indigeribile", proseguite nella lettura. Seth Nehil & Jgrzinich non sono due "matti scocciati" (come li definirebbe qualche vostro amico capitolino), ma fanno parte di quel circuito artistico delle installazioni e della sperimentazione elettroacustica che rimanda a Cage ed al suo manipolo di "sciagurati senza Dio". Rumore che non è rumore, musica che non è musicale e che comunque dovrebbe sempre essere accompagnata dalla lettura "dei come e dei perchè" di ogni singola "piece", proprio perchè il suo valore, prima ancora che musicale, è concettuale. Per chi di voi ha masticato un po' isolazionismo, Koner ,Soviet*France ,Main potrebbero a grandi (grandissime) linee fornire un qualche inquadramento per poter immaginare un suono che non è facile descrivere.
Partendo da Confluence si "affrontano" subito i venti minuti di Pneuma , che, a dispetto della durata, cullano fra rielaborazioni di field-recording e suoni acustici persi fra le maglie di un tappeto di "drones". La successiva The Distant Edge espone immediatamente uno dei temi cari ai nostri due autori: i concetti di "interazione fra gruppi" e di "partecipazione nel contesto sociale della attività di generazione del suono". Oltre alla decina di partecipazioni individuali (fra cui svetta uno Stephen Austin che a qualcuno potrebbe ricordare qualcosa), gran parte del materiale proviene da un riadattamento di una manifestazione registrata a Belgrado. Il risultato è una sorta di amalgama uniforme di voci e di rumore intrecciati magistralmente, questa volta non così distanti da alcuni studi classico-contemporanei del caro e vecchio Morricone . 'Lohme' , per onor di cronaca, è stata registrata alla Stazione Topolo in Italia (non chiedetemi dove), in questo caso Grzinich e Nehil presentano un intero Resonance Ensemble risultato leggermente meno efficace rispetto a 'The Distant Edge' , ma comunque efficace.
Seguendo le indicazioni degli autori, l'ascolto di Confluence deve essere assolutamente accompagnato da quello di Stria , edito dalla belga Erewhon. Anche in Stria si parte con i venti minuti di Tome Gather , per cui viene utilizzata una nuova decina di individui mescolati ad elementi sonori creati da Nehil e Jgrzinich medesimi. Tinte fosche, sfondi poco luminosi e qualche rumore post-industriale; se solo Marinetti avesse potuto musicare la depressione del nuovo millennio, forse avrebbe avuto questo suono: un cupo "drone" dal cui fondo emerge faticosamente qualche suono. 'Arboreal' (alcune delle fonti provengono nuovamente dalla Stazione Topolo), coerentemente con ciò che suggerisce il titolo, ritorna alla forma più familiare della "field-recording". Il CD si chiude con i sedici minuti di The Mirrored Corner , dove i "drones" sono estratti dalla Biotope Installation effettuata in un museo di Ljubijana. Suoni meccanici lontani che si avvicinano timidamente per poi scomparire in vecchie costruzioni abbandonate, "Ormai essere lontani...il tempo del nostro amore un mare lucente e morto... Nella luce la tua parte è finita, non ho buio nel petto per tenere la tua ombra". Inutile mentire: l'impegno richiesto all'ascoltatore è molto, ma Neihil e Jgrzinich "significano" là dove le parole non servono più a nulla.

This CD falls in the category of "File under: uneasy - no guts no glory - listening", so if you have steady nerves, you're not using overly strong psychedelic substances, and you like trying something a bit indigestible, continue reading. Seth Nehil and Jgrzinich are not two "annoying madmen" (as some of your friends might say), but are part of that artistic circle associated with installations and experimentation in electroacoustica that takes us back to Cage and his manipulation of "disasters without God". Noise that's not noise, music that's not musical, and so needs to always be accompanied by the notes on "whys and wherefors" for each piece, especially because its value, more than musical, is conceptual. For those of you who have tried chewing on a little Isolationism, Koner, Soviet*France, Main, you could probably outline (a very broad outline at that) a framework to help imagine a sound that is not easy to describe. Arriving at Confluence, you come face to face immediately with “Pneuma”, which though lengthy, sways between re-elaborations of field recordings and acoustic sounds lost amongst the weave of a carpet of drones. The following “The Distant Edge” expounds immediately the favorite themes of our two composers: the concepts of "interaction among groups", and "the activity of generating sounds in a social context". Along with the ten-something individuals participating (amongst whom is Stephen Austin who might remind some of you of something), a large part of the material comes from an adaptation of a demonstration recorded in Belgrade. The result is a sort of uniform amalgam of skillfully braided voices and sounds, in this case not too dissimilar to a few classical-contemporary studies of our dear old Morricone. “Lohme”, per onor di cronaca, was recorded at Topolo Station in Italy (don't ask me where it is), and in this case Nehil and Grzinich present an entire Resonance Ensemble whose result is somewhat less effective than “The Distant Edge”, but still effective.
According to the composers, a listening of Confluence absolutely has to be accompanied by a listening of Stria, produced by the Belgian label Erewhon. Also in Stria, one begins with twenty minutes of “Tome Gather”, for which were used another group of ten participants mixed with sonorous elements created by Nehil and Grzinich themselves. Gloomy colors, a dark backdrop, and a few post-industrial sounds; if only Marinetti could have put to music the depression of the new millenium, it might have had this sound: a dismal drone from which a drudging sound emerges . “Arboreal” (some of the source material again comes from Topolo Station), in keeping with the title, returns to the more familiar form of field recording. The CD closes with sixteen minutes of “The Mirrored Corner”, where the drones were obtained from the Biotope Installation presented in a museum in Lublijana. Distant mechanical sounds, that approach timidly only to disappear amongst old abandoned buildings. "Now far away... the time of our love a sea of light and death... In the light, your part is finished, I don't have enough darkness in my breast to hold your shadow." There's no point lying: it takes considerable effort to listen to, but Nehil and Grzinich express themselves in a place where words no longer serve.
- Andrea Ferraris, http://www.sodapop.it/nehiljg.htm (translation by Tom Nehil)

2 collaborators working across the years bring you, in the first track, drone tones, every shifting and evolving. Low rumbles that add texture, conflicting higher pitches that swoop between each other, a side tone that you don’t even hear unless you ignore all other sounds. There are many things going on. Yes, you could fall asleep to this, but I think it would be better used as headphone music while reading a book sitting cross-legged on the floor. The second track is different, dropping nuts and bolts onto a plexiglass sheet? Whatever it is, it is heavily textured sound. There are a couple of different sound sources and hidden sounds in this, building from simple drops to what could be grease frying to the sound of fire at a small campsite - all from the same original source, just processed. The final song is back to heavily layered tones. This isn’t a dark release, iI wouldn’t say it is without emotion, but it leaves it up to you, if you are having a bad day this ride with you down the hole, if you are happy, you can feel the energy and excitement.
- Don Poe, www.ear-rational.com

Sound sculptor Seth Nehil (1973) began his musical career in Texas (he was one half of the duo Philosophical Society, that released the cassettes Transactions of... in 1989 and Crimes Against... in 1990), but is now a resident of Portland, Oregon. His music for tapes and instruments is a descendant of the tape-music experiments of the 1950s. Tracing the Skins of Clouds (Kaon, 1998) was the manifesto of his chamber music for found objects and instruments.
John Grzinich (aka Jgrzinich) is a builder of amplified piano wire instruments, who uses them to compose even more sophisticated sound sculptures. He has created video and audio installations in Eastern Europe. He is also a member of the improvising collective Frequency Curtain (Elevator Bath, 2003) with Rick Reed and Josh Ronsen, and of the live improvisation ensemble ERG with Michael Northam.
Alial Straa is the live electro-acoustic ensemble that Nehil and Grzinich formed in 1994. The two continued their experiments (in particular, letting a group of people make random percussive sounds by banging a variety of found objects) and eventually documented them on a couple of twin releases, Stria (Erewhon, 2002) and Confluence (Intransitive, 2002).
Stria (Erewhon, 2002) contains three droning pieces in slow motion. 'Tome Gather' (composed by Nehil) is largely uneventful, except for the moment (towards the beginning) when it summons up ghostly voices from the center of the universe, but for the rest the exploration of sound fails to sustain interest. Ditto for the shorter 'Arboreal' (again composed by Nehil), which is too busy admiring the source noises to actually try to do something with them. 'The Mirrored Corner' (composed by John Grzinich) is the highlight here: the drones expand and contract like in a drug-induced hallucination, and the massive vibration sends powerful shockwaves to the cerebellum (the last eight minutes are redundant, though, or should have been a separate piece).
Confluence is the more intense of the two releases. Here, the duo's study of timbres, texture and dynamics reaches new heights of paroxysm, as if they achieved a hypnotic state with Stria and then let their imagination roam inside that state. 'Pneuma' begins quietly, and for a while we are let to believe that this will be the usual "exploration of time and space" that is prevalent in this age of minimal digital music. But from the beginning we are enveloped in whirling drones, so that the overall feeling is one of an approaching storm whose clouds are tied to cans and pots. Suddenly, the piece climaxes with a chaotic crescendo of found percussions. That in turn leads into a section of ominous drones, as if the nasty clouds were receding. "Pneuma" means "breathing" in Greek, but, if that is the intended meaning, this is the slow-motion replay of the last gasp of a terminally-ill tuberculosis patient. Lohme, the other tour de force, begins with a clangor of percussions that immediately brings to mind Terry Riley's 'In C', but the main flow of discrete noises is altered by a underlying drone, that acts almost like a guiding signal. Soon, this refined vibration takes over and establishes a much less playful mood, as the entire universe seems to be shaking in unison inside this colossal mantra while drifting at the speed of light towards a black hole (whose deadly sountrack in fact occupies the last eight minutes). These sound scultures (both composed by John Grzinich) are vivid and poignant. The brief 'The Distant Edge' gathers a great many buzzing voices and traffic noises. This could have been a 'Hymnen' (Stockhausen's classic collage of voices) for the 21st century. Unfortunately, the duo only toys with the idea but doesn't pursue it with the required expressionistic pathos.
- Piero Scaruffi | (Translation by/ Tradotto da xxx)