This is the first time Poland’s Zbigniew Karkowski (currently based in Japan) has released a collaboration with America’s Damion Romero. Both artists have a huge (and often overlapping) list of former partners in crime so it was probably inevitable that they would cross paths. It is a good job they did because this album is one of the best noise albums of the year. Although noise is probably a poor description of it: non-musical, alleatoric experiments in mood being a bit more precise. This is not an exercise in deafening sound but an exploration of low frequency sounds and moving a lot of air with a speaker system.
The feelings that arise during 9 Before 9 are those of emptiness, solitariness and space. It is the sound of the hum that makes up the background radiation of space somehow picked up on a normal stereo. At low volumes, 9 Before 9 has very little going on but once the volume is pushed up the bass-heavy rumble fills the room. It is an underlying noise, like the sound of plane when you become accustomed to it during a flight, easy to ignore but fascinating once it is given some attention.
The album is split into three untitled 18 minute parts. The first part sounds the most like the in flight jet engine sound described above. As the piece creeps to a close, pops and crackles appear which add an occasional textural change to the piece. Near the end, the sound becomes unsettling, less like an everyday background noise and more like the beast lurking on the other side of reality. This other side becomes more evident with the second part, the low drone changes to a shifting buzz sounding like the world’s biggest and most pissed off bees. Buried in the mix is the sound of wind and rain but the drips of rain sounds more like a wet chewing sound in this context than drops of water.
The third and final part of 9 Before 9 takes things down a notch, bass pulses again become the predominant feature of the music. Metallic rasping covers the piece like dust in an old room and below the floorboards of this room come sounds that are either a radio being played in a room below (muffled and incomprehensible) or the sound of something unnatural moving about. The uneasiness that Karkowski and Romero pull from what sounds like very few sources is remarkable; compared to the sheer force needed by other artists to cause a similar amount of unease Karkowski and Romero make it seem simple.
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