Originally available only as 10", now in special-sleeved compact disc, No Sign comes from artists with a bit more exposure than Sedimental is used to; the music, also, occupies austere and familiar realms, making it less the shock-to-the-head I've come to expect from the label, however deep listening turns over a complex and powerful piece.
Sedimental
The pin-prick-on-paper sleeve design is a nice foreshadow of the sound inside, reassuring too, as I've certainly used prickly adjectives to describe microtonal music with a significantly more maximalist approach than this. No Sign's punctures are spaced to produce a decorative, even conservative aesthetic that comes through sonically as well. Kyle Bruckmann and Ernst Karel play wind instruments arranged through forcefields of analog electronic noise. Though fully engrained, their horns are nonetheless distinct and often plaintive, pooling as they do around the open spaces and between scratches of mechanical interference. The word may be "restraint," but that implies an interest in suggesting an instrument's extremes, or at least a dialogic structure in the music, neither of which are present. With EKG, texture and transition feel extra tight, precise as a cube of pin-prickings, a quality that gets reinforced by the track titles, each a time interval, traveling from "Years" down to "Seconds." As with Murray's Places, the focus here seems to be overlappings of sound decay rather than an emphasis on particular lushness or complexity of concrète sound environments, something closer to the work of Axel Dörner whose prolific appearances preceded EKG's in both the Sedimental and Locust catalogs. The supreme breathlessness of Karel and Bruckmann's horns gathers everything into a groaning wheeze of descent rather than the crackling of surface play that defines most else in the closest-checkable genre. No Sign's uniqueness is a product of these visions of closely-structured time lapse coming together with the improvisational intentions and microscopic attentions of a thousand small sounds.
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