A Closer Listen
The first sounds on Terminal Analog, a collaboration between guitarist Dave Brown and electronic musician Jason Kahn just released by Room 40, is the strum of a guitar, but only just barely. The scraping, screeching sounds of electricity emerge almost instantaneously. Over the course of the track the guitar continues insistently but sparely, Brown almost hesitantly strumming solitary, open-tuned chords alongside Kahn’s raucous chorus of chirping, crashing, squeaking, and more. Over the course of album opener “Merri,” Brown’s guitar playing grows more assertive and more electric, as though it were trying to match Kahn’s splintered chorus of electricity.
The three pieces which comprise Terminal Analog all emerged from a string of shows Brown and Kahn played together in Australia in the fall of 2023. All of the recordings feature a similar aesthetic comprised of, as Kahn describes it in the album’s press release, the sound of Brown’s “atmospherically plangent” guitar and Kahn’s own “shattered and erratic electronics.”
Terminal Analog sits in the lineage of noise and industrial music, especially in that music’s reliance on the space in which it was recorded. Like a live Throbbing Gristle or Merzbow album, Terminal Analog makes the contingency of the live event part of its subject. It’s music that requires, or maybe just requests, you imagine what it was like to share the space in which it was created and consumed. Music that is a product of its environment. Music in which the space in which it was created, the particular energy of the performers, the crowd, the vibes, are part and parcel of the object we listen to now.
On the second track “Loddon,” Brown’s guitar instantly takes up more space, aurally and conceptually, the strumming is more ferocious, almost menacing. Kahn also plays with different sounds, the recording of distant voices is mixed with the same squeaks and squeals, but everything unfolds for the first few minutes in front of a denser wash of static. Like any good improvised set, the pieces can be approached as a conversation. At times on Terminal Analog it really does seem as though Brown and Kahn are filling the empty spaces left by the texture or timbre of the other’s instruments.
On the final track “Molonglo,” Brown’s guitar starts chugging right away. It’s a quieter start than the earlier pieces but that only makes the sense of expectation stronger. New textures are inserted too, some of Kahn’s electronics seem more organic, like the knocking together of blocks of wood. The over twenty minute track is an exhausting listen, the sounds in constant, crescendoing movement around the listener before finally ending with an expected but welcome release of tension and a return to relative stillness at the end.
Does noise music draw attention to the space between audience and artist better than other genres? Or does it just invite a consideration of that space more powerfully because there isn’t the usual inventory of ideas to hold on to? Terminal Analog, despite its volume, is minimalist music. An album that encourages listeners to attend at least as much to what isn’t here as what is. (Jennifer Smart)
Fri Jun 21 00:01:15 GMT 2024