Blessed Initiative - Blessed Initiative

Pitchfork 75

Experimental producer and sound artist Yair Elazar Glotman has an unparalleled knack for wresting gold from uncomfortable sounds. With the album he released under the moniker KETEV in 2014, Glotman gutted the basic operating principles of techno. KETEV’s music is rife with vaporous rhythmic apparitions that resemble dance beats, even if you can't touch them physically. Likewise, on his 2015 album Études, released under his own name, Glotman basically threw his classical acoustic bass training out the window in favor of hacking the strings with the bow to make solemn dark ambient drones. And yet Études has a certain grace of form that even an untrained ear can readily trace back to classical music.

With the debut of his new project Blessed Initiative, he ventures into even more forbidding territory. This time, Glotman, who works in sound installations and film scores, drew mainly from foley recordings. Blessed Initiative begins with a sound that resembles a huffing car muffler, digitally chopped up to create the sensation of air being sucked out of the listening space. On an instinctual level, the listener can't help but feel a sense of suffocation—an effect that Glotman plays up by introducing gurgling and splashing sounds. And when a human voice suddenly appears and gets choked away, it’s as if we’re listening to a person drown. It's gripping, astonishing, and nearly unbearable.

“Jazz as commodity,” the album’s cleverly titled second track, deposits us in a similarly unsettling place. At first, the piece is completely devoid of rhythm or melody. We hear only a perforating sound—something like a door opening and echoing across the expanse of a parking garage. Glotman builds a beat out of multiple layers so that eventually it takes on the character of a heavy-footed creature dragging chains. “Xanax interlude (relax!)” features a stereo panorama of crunching sounds that might make Matmos shiver, bringing to mind the magnified acoustics of insects moving through soil, while “Delirium juice & taste of jewelry,” reprises the air-sucking and bubbling effects of the album's opening.

The sensations induced by these works can be profoundly unsettling. Yet, as usual, Glotman’s brand of discomfort never loses its flow and, on repeated listens, even acquires a certain majesty. The history of experimental music is littered with records that give bragging rights to anyone with the stamina to endure them. Blessed Initiative doesn’t fit that mold. Much to Glotman’s credit, there are moments where he is utterly convincing at bringing the sound-installation experience to you. His skillful placement of natural (or at least natural-seeming) reverberation casts the composer as an architect, someone who could have spent hours drawing blueprints for these tracks as much as he spent working on the KYMA software system he used to generate and manipulate some of the sounds.

Blessed Initiative would be intriguing enough based only on its visceral sense of physical pace. But there’s more dimension to Glotman’s process than that. You glimpse his vision most clearly in second half of “Delirium juice & taste of jewelry”; as dozens of wind chimes clatter, Glotman frames them as if they’re doing so in an indoor space, i.e: without wind. You end up with the distinct sense of having stumbled upon something magical, an unseen force bringing these inanimate objects to life. As with the rest of the album, Glotman scoops the music of any traces of human presence, which makes you feel as if there’s no one else around to witness this strange and beautiful event. Describing it is impossible, and no one will believe you, but you know you were lucky to experience something special—much like this album as a whole.