Novi_sad: sound analysis on recordings (by BJNilsen, Daniel Menche, Francisco López and Mika Vainio), transformation of the results and application of data
In actuality, this is a classic case of words meaning very little. For several reasons. The first translates as “look at the names of the participants”, already warranting sympathetic perceptual experiences and advanced acoustic properties defining the sensorial width and the artistic significance of the original gesture. This – needless to say – includes the project’s mastermind Thanasis Kaproulias, whose relatively scarce number of available recordings is inversely proportional to their upper-class sonic content. Then again: how can a writer produce a serviceable assessment without repeating what’s distinctly explicated by the conceiver on the album’s notes? (Answer: you plainly restate them by merely changing the style, as anyone can see most everywhere on the web). A third possibility would be the “comparison way”, but there’s pretty much nothing around these days to be reckoned as homologous to these four profoundly rumbling-hissing-and-roaring tracks. At any rate, they deserve more than a superficial rehashing of the obvious, being clearly superior to many vaguely akin ejections floating around this sphere of psychoacoustic research.
Right, a few distinguishing traits from the contributors are detectable in the mixes (although Menche’s segment – a momentous crescendo of pressure culminating in choral undulation – is less typical than expected). Perhaps a correct reading might reside in a similarity between Neuroplanets and a chronological sequence of life phases, starting with BJNilsen’s “borderline minimalism” gradualness flowing into stirring magnitude, transiting across López’s hammering reiterations born from the ashes of subterranean quaking, concluding with Vainio’s harshly penetrative distortions that nevertheless set off a sort of “strained absence mode” in our somatic position, ending matters in unequivocal quietude. Aside from the anticipated stunning phenomena stemming from the modification of antipodal frequencies and the mutable dynamics applied by Novi_sad, what’s truly striking is the manifest contradiction of sounds related to the failure of nonfunctional human parts that, together with other kinds of concealed yet vivifying unearthly substances, manage to bring forth the opposite result: a “center ground” founded on the constant provision of enlivening signals, at the same time compelling, pathologic, and quite enlightening.
MASSIMO RICCI. TOUCHING EXTREMES. 