JEPH JERMAN / DOUG THERIAULT – Tathata

Nitkie

The credits read “percussion, objects” (Jerman) and “guitar, electronics” (Theriault), yet Tathata is the kind of record that makes one instantly feel at home amidst sounds that possess a natural tendency to inform a particular juncture of the day and stay there, welcome (and, in a way, relieving) throughout the whole duration. A physical narrative would not get far from the usual terminology replete with terms such as “rustle”, “crackle”, “hum” and other sorts of depiction of what derives from the closeness of a microphone during a process of manipulation of small things on a table. This includes the guitar strings, occasionally touched, grated and let briefly resonate in Rowe-ish fashion. The couple doesn’t seem to follow a precise plan, but I could be wrong. Their research tends to the retrieval of undefined quantities of “beauty” (please note the inverted commas) in matters that hypothetically should not contain any. The manner in which they dribble the potential silences by deploying a great variety of minuscule details, ever-changing dynamics (always in the low-volume region, though) and uneven frequencies places them quite distant from those who screen the inability to engross a listener behind that very stillness. The psychophysical being absorbs the substances without effort, receiving stimuli that contribute to an overall sense of peaceful stability. The will of repeating the experience is both a testimony of the success of the method, and the fruit of the tensionless curiosity generated by these sequences of untreated events, a reticent modesty mixing with heavy rain right now. And it’s just perfect.