Rale - Twelve hours of the Night [ekhein]

Rale is the moniker of William Hutson who runs Accidie Records and works largely with an analog synthesizer. His myspace bears the amusing and astute inscription “newage rhymed with sewage” in the hope of evading comparisons with New Age drone, aligning himself instead with the swathe of post-industrial noise/drone practitioners. The title of the double C20 pack makes me think of Jim O’Rourke’s Long Night which finally saw the light of day last year. Whether the tapes here were recorded over said twelve hours is unknown, but that O’Rourke disc isn’t such a bad touchstone for some of the music here either.

The first side is dominated soft tones, which if I didn’t know better I could have sworn had been sent bouncing around the walls in some enormous underground cavern as with the site specific recordings of Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster, although ‘deep listening’ is probably awkwardly close to new age as a reference point for Hutson. Nevertheless, notes hang in the air, receding and returning, cohering and colliding. In the background what could be the gentle purr of an oscillating fan conflicts with this impression, conjuring images of a hot and sticky summer night, Hutson hunched over the his equipment. This gentle whir bleeds over onto the second side, but the warmth of the cavern is replaced with the cool enclosure of a large fishbowl, lending a glassine edge to the wavering tones.

The second cassette shifts the reverberation timbre once again, apparently inhabiting a long section of piping, along whose length standing waves come and go. The gentle background fan whir has morphed into a subtlely more percussive rhythmic chirrup as if the condenser mic has been replaced with a piezo. The least static of the pieces thus far, it’s tonal quality seems to vanish, snaking around a bend, and reappear without any explicit addition or subtraction of sounds throughout. Turning the tape over I have to admit I double-took, checking that I hadn’t in fact put a Scott Reber tape in instead. This side contains what seems to be a field recording of a busy restaurant as heard from the air-conditioning ducting. Air rushes past, resonating through the tubing, barely masking conversation and the momentary clatters of plates and cutlery. Perhaps after ten hours hard grind over the synth inside, Hutson decided he needed some food and shot down to the local diner for the last two hours. The microphones seems to navigate through the space as the track progresses, coming out of the ducting the low resonance dissipates replaced by overbearing echoes of crockery noise, occasional recalling a murky environmental take on Xenakis’ Bohor. As the microphone gradually circles down from the ceiling snatches of conversation drift uncomfortably close and the attacks of waiters clearing table become sharp, and here Hutson leaves us, in a crowded musicless place.

Really excellent work, I now can’t wait for the forthcoming LP on Arbor, track this one down if you can.