There are composers who simply elect to remove themselves from the compromising paths leading to short-term renown, focused as they are on the effective significance of sonic inquiry rather than the mere necessity of being acknowledged on a saturated “scene”. Asher Tuil definitely belongs to the former category.
I was mildly shocked after realizing that nearly four years have passed from my last review of this man’s work. It made me think about innumerable days spent dealing with pointless issues and inconsequential music, as opposed to staying on course with artists who exploit the minimum available means to keep digging deeper and deeper.
Accordingly, describing Reduplications as a genuinely minimalist record is not totally wrong, whereas branding its sonorities as “ambient” would be a huge underestimation. If anything, Tuil’s research possesses a meteorological character, as if carried out at extreme altitudes.
The long duration – eight pieces, time ranging from 16’25” to 18’48” – necessarily requires to set aside a couple of lonely hours, in order to effectively treasure the intuitive knowledge furnished by the music. You can’t get that in fragments, not even in the rare quiet islands of the Sea of Hollow Rambling.
The proximity of an ever-present hiss (an Asher trademark) and frequencies spanning from shivering subsonics to white-light beams informs the sense of aware composure conveyed by the experience. The tracks respect the listener’s physiology, an acoustic rendition of slow breathing inside a dimension encompassing both invariability and ephemerality.
It’s not a continuum, then; more like a progression of measured ebbs and flows across the layers of discernment. The indispensability of unselfishness is entirely satisfied by what one hears and gets permeated by. Indeed it takes almost nothing to reach the stage of inattentiveness towards normal human activity; one absorbs essential meanings through the sheer processing of an instinctive response.
Then it’s back to quotidian. But it’s been a remarkably healthy parenthesis.
MASSIMO RICCI. TOUCHING EXTREMES. 