Mecha/Orga
56:24
Absurd 2007

01. 56:24 [56:24]

An elderly gent glances sidelong at the camera with an air of what seems to be mild suspicion - pipe in hand, walking stick hooked on the back of an adjacent empty chair. The back cover shows the same space, viewed from a different angle, devoid of people this time. Open up the gatefold and it seems to be some sort of cookshop, maybe in an old people's home. Maybe not. Hard to figure out what's for lunch, too, but the music accompanying it is straightforward enough. Or is it?

"Drone" is a word you'd given up for Lent, but it's still the best one available to describe Yiorgis Sakellarious's 56:24 - that's both the title and the duration. Meta-drone, maybe. Nah, too vague and pretentious. Mega-drone might do. It all starts off simply enough with just one tone, which is gradually, almost imperceptibly joined by others, thickening to form a huge, pulsing cluster, the kind of complex simplicity Phill Niblock would love. La Monte Young once famously spoke about drones you could get inside, which seems to imply some effort on the part of the listener: concentrate enough on those frequencies and you'll access their higher levels of spectral complexity. With 56:24 you don't have a choice - it sucks you in, wraps you tight and nearly stifles you. Shame it all fades rather brutally at the end; a sudden plunge into black hole might have been more fun than fade to grey. But maybe that's what the guy in the photo's afraid of. Nice one, Yiorgis.

>> divsh / mfire (77mb) (d-_-b)
>> love it, buy it (Tochnit Aleph)