TOD DOCKSTADER

Aerial 2

Genre: ELECTRONIC

2LP (Black Vinyl)

Boomkat Product Review:

First time vinyl pressing of a concrète masterwork by experimental autodidact Tod Dockstader, returning to orbit with a stunning mesh of shortwave radio signals siphoned from the aether and arranged into a mind-bending experience - RIYL Roland Kayn, The Conet Project, Leyland Kirby, Jim O’Rourke.

‘Aerial 2’ is the fruit of 15 years of Dockstader parsing the atmosphere for shortwave radio. Together with its other volume issued 2005-2006, it marked Dockstader’s re-entry to the release schedules decades after his batches of library music in the ‘80s, and nearly a half century since he entered a sphere dominated by academia by the back door with his DIY tape spliced ‘Eight Electronic Pieces’ in 1961, which was realised late at night in an NYC studio after working as editor in Hollywood during the ‘50s. ‘Aerial 2’ finds the late composer sticking to his instinctive approach with fathomless results full of gyring, shearing dynamics and complex textures and timbres that can’t help but lead the mind to the other side, placing self-taught technicality at the service of incredibly imaginative, immersive scapes.

Sifted from some 90 hours of nocturnal recordings that scanned the atmosphere for signs of life, the results pitch those cross signals and etheric filaments into plangent compositions oceanic or cosmic in scope. In that sense he follows a thread of inspiration that lit up imaginations of the earliest cavemen thru to advanced ancient civilisations and contemporary physicists with appropriate measures of atavist and futurist wonder brought into sharper, yet still elusive, focus via prisms of C.20th technology. The results are perhaps best compared historically to the awe-inspiring para-academic vision of Roland Kayn, yet differ in their grasp of cosmic chaos and rhythmic diffraction, and are more simply perceived as a stunning expression of proprioceptive intuition - projecting light years out from earth to find a place in the universe, ultimately making us feel like a speck of dust.

2LP (Black Vinyl) (21)