minimal self

Formula Of Reversal

This album by John Everall's Minimal Self for the Raster-Noton related Wavetrap imprint strives to document a period in the artist's life that was said to be characterised by an intense psychological turmoil. If that all sounds a bit too personal for comfort, fear not: Everall approaches this subject matter in a dignifiedly guarded fashion, taking samples of his own speech as a starting point before cloaking them in a series of processes and (to paraphrase the label's blurb) 'mutilations' that established some sort of barrier between the listener and the roaming consciousness of the artist. You'd be hard-pressed to be able to identify much of this as being rooted in the timbres of the human voice. For much of the time you're left chasing shadows and the remnants of sounds that have been all but rubbed out - smudged over a fifty-minute collage of abstraction and ghostly texture. Recommended.