Jason Kahn
"Vanishing Point"
23five CD
The American sound-artist Jason Kahn is an exacting technician when it comes to the principles of noise. However, his application of noise in composition is not that of Merzbow or Masonna, with teeth-gnashing explosions of distortion, feedback, and volume; rather, Kahn’s psychoacoustic techniques employ the specific frequencies of white, pink, brown, and blue noise in works that reflect the ideals of minimalism. These are sounds that regularly occur through the constant vibration of machinery; and Kahn is more than happy to appropriate such events through field recording. He also generates complementary noises through systems that involve the rattling architecture of a drum kit or through his trusted analog synthesizer.
Vanishing Point is a 47 minute composition, which Kahn has dedicated to his daughter who died shortly before Kahn began working on this piece in 2007. For all of the phenomenological studies and stoic mesmerism attributed to much of his catalogue, Vanishing Point is a subtle and hypnotic elegy for rattling metals, timbral vibration, gossamer static, hissing field recordings, and those aforementioned colored noises. Soon into the piece, Kahn introduces a flickered ghost of melody whose luminous tones manifest ever so slightly against his contrails of noise. The upper register hiss and statics of these layered noises slowly drop in pitch and frequency over the duration of the piece, revealing subharmonic rumblings and an oceanic current that tugs at the agitated textures of Kahn’s surface noises. This glacial, minimalist shift renders Vanishing Point elegant and meditative.
In Kahn’s own words, “At first I thought of the title in reference to Louise’s passing, that point where she vanished from our lives, but on further reflection I came to see the compostion as dealing with other vanishing points. I address the idea of one’s sense of time vanishing, being immersed in sound and entering a place of timelessness. There is also the idea of boundaries between electronic and acoustic sound vanishing, as in this piece I draw on both sources. And finally, in the sense of aural perspective extending to the point where we imagine it ending, as the compostion stretches on towards its vista, slowly vanishing.”
http://jasonkahn.net
http://23five.org
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