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CD Feature/ V.A.: "Active Agent of Sounds"

  Tobias

I know it has become a pretty unpopular dogma of lately, but music and science do belong together: Stradivari made use of it to build his violins and the synthesizer revolution of the 20th century was initiated at Universities by students and professors. So there is nothing obscure about it, when a label like Klangwirkstoff wants to be perceived as a „catalyst in music theory“, researching the influence of musical structures on the human neural physiology and psychology.

On the other hand, you do not need to go back to school to enjoy this double-CD. Stephen Hawking once claimed that each formula in a book would drastically reduce its economic potential and Klangwirkstoff have therefore opted to reduce their entire theoretical cosmos to a single equation: (1:a) x 2 n = f. This is „the formula to calculate any cyclic occurrences in octave-analogue tones and rhythms“, as their website points out and the immediate advantages purportedly lie in being able to use resonances outside of our immediate sensory awareness.

There are several good reasons to believe this postulation is much more than just esoteric fluff. For one, the tone „om“ in eastern meditation practises is a several-octave transposition of the earth's rotational sound, implying there is a link between the human body and the physically inaudible oscillation around us. And then several composers and projects have repeatedly brought this idea to the surface again, two of whom are included on „Active Agent of Sound“.

One of them is Alex Patterson, who enjoyed a short stint at the top of the British charts in the early 90s and whose collaboration with Steve Hillage's latest project „Mirror System“ is a cloudy breath reminiscent of his own work with and as The Orb and an early highlight of this compilation.

The second proponent is enigmatic duo Coil, whose Time Machines alter ego constututes a similar experiment to simulate the effect and resonance of halucinatory substances with music. Thirteen minute-long „7-Methoxy-ß-Carboline“ is built around a stretching and deflating bass pattern, repeatedly superseded by droney films of flanged and filtered tones.

Scientifically sound or not, this is imposing and positively surreal music and the fact that the Klangwirkstoff crew have resisted the temptation of using the two „star-tracks“ as bait to lure in customers by placing them upfront on the first disc already implies that the other material is of an equal quality and eschews typical clichees:

„Solardrifting“ by Brain Entertainment Laboratory, a semi-epic track full of rhythmic changes, whispering echoes and haunting chord progressions, feels mysteriously spontaneous and almost like a piece of live electronics. Motom's „Aum“, meanwhile, at first surrenders to the dictum of slowmotion funk, before flowing into a spacey microtonal soundscape on a one-way ticket to Venus.

CD1 is driven by warm, dreamy percussion and intelligent, meandering arrangements which have more in common with the galactic eccentricity of the electronic branch of Krautrock than your stereotypical chillout, downtempo and even ambient imitations. The second disc leaps from ethno-influenced shamanism to the abovementioned minimal hypnosis of Coil and back to more raw and earthly sounds again. Both are rendered special by devotedly careful seguing and sequencing, which awards this sampler the air of an extremely well-conceived DJ set and of two cohesive collages with many different moods.

It is music which lends itself perfectly to play while reading, working attentively or to lock yourself in a dark and empty room with. I really couldn't tell whether it is the consequential following of the theory of the cosmic octave which has yielded this result or the intuitive musical skills of the artists involved. But on a market saturated with electronic compilations of an all but identical nature, any of the two is fine with me.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: Klangwirkstoff Records