This one isn’t actually the latest offering from TSOL, but number eight. At 44 minutes in total it’s considerably longer than the other tapes on the label. It contains what Reber refers to as two harsh noise wall realisations of Alvin Lucier’s piece I am sitting in a room, plunging straight into the process several takes through. Build this together documents an electronics workshop led by Jessica Rylan and Victoria O’Hanlon in assembling their own Flower Electronics synth, while Isolated and Demoralised is simply noted as “sounds of AS220 sounding in AS220”. Assuming this to be something of an anomaly in Reber’s musical process, it’s surprising how much it bears the characteristics of his other work. On side one we hear the traits of Reber’s field recorded contributions in Ten Thousand Things. Mutters accrue echo upon echo unfurling against the walls and ceiling, pounding back into the microphone, filling it with subsonic flutter and fierce crackle. And on side two (the more successful piece in my estimation) the overloaded signal deterioration, shapeless bass pummel and resonant tonal drone which mark out his Work/Death project are all here. Here Reber even manages to eschew the noise wall sensibility, achieving compositional development by gradually filtering sound through acoustics. A very worthwhile recontextualisation of a classic process piece, yielding entirely different results and demonstrating it’s continued relevance to a new generation of noisemongers.
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