Enchanting, transcendent New Music from Portland, Oregon's peerless duo of Matt Carlson (modular synths) and Jonathan Sielaff (bass clarinet) aka Golden Retriever. Their 3rd album, 'Seer' arrives two years after the complex and enlightened 'Occupied With The Unspoken' and 'Light Cones' albums first breached our consciousness. In the interim they've refined their improvised techniques and their production process to take the American experimental traditions of Alvin Curran and David Behrman into bold new realms of sonic syntax. The results are challenging yet deeply gratifying, opening wide portals to dissonant, intricately structured interzones of acoustic and electronic synthesis. In opener, 'Petrichor' Carlson uses an 11-limit just intonation system with the potential to create otoacoustic emissions - those freaky aural illusions commonly explored by Florian Hecker, and first pioneered in the sound installations of Maryanne Amacher - amidst its billowing, queered harmonics, whilst the oily synth layers and pealing clarinet tones contained in the vaulted space of 'Sharp Stones' toy with the gestural notions of modal free jazz, and 'Archipelago' beautifully brings the outside in with layered field recordings meshed to frothy modular sounds and Sielaff's airborne expressions. The unanchored 'Flight Song' similarly explores free space, and the 12 minute 'Superposition' quietly brings the LP to land with a mix of sensitive emotional meditation and meticulous editing that neatly sums up the record, and Golden Retriever's ability to to make complex ideas sound sublime.
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Enchanting, transcendent New Music from Portland, Oregon's peerless duo of Matt Carlson (modular synths) and Jonathan Sielaff (bass clarinet) aka Golden Retriever. Their 3rd album, 'Seer' arrives two years after the complex and enlightened 'Occupied With The Unspoken' and 'Light Cones' albums first breached our consciousness. In the interim they've refined their improvised techniques and their production process to take the American experimental traditions of Alvin Curran and David Behrman into bold new realms of sonic syntax. The results are challenging yet deeply gratifying, opening wide portals to dissonant, intricately structured interzones of acoustic and electronic synthesis. In opener, 'Petrichor' Carlson uses an 11-limit just intonation system with the potential to create otoacoustic emissions - those freaky aural illusions commonly explored by Florian Hecker, and first pioneered in the sound installations of Maryanne Amacher - amidst its billowing, queered harmonics, whilst the oily synth layers and pealing clarinet tones contained in the vaulted space of 'Sharp Stones' toy with the gestural notions of modal free jazz, and 'Archipelago' beautifully brings the outside in with layered field recordings meshed to frothy modular sounds and Sielaff's airborne expressions. The unanchored 'Flight Song' similarly explores free space, and the 12 minute 'Superposition' quietly brings the LP to land with a mix of sensitive emotional meditation and meticulous editing that neatly sums up the record, and Golden Retriever's ability to to make complex ideas sound sublime.
Enchanting, transcendent New Music from Portland, Oregon's peerless duo of Matt Carlson (modular synths) and Jonathan Sielaff (bass clarinet) aka Golden Retriever. Their 3rd album, 'Seer' arrives two years after the complex and enlightened 'Occupied With The Unspoken' and 'Light Cones' albums first breached our consciousness. In the interim they've refined their improvised techniques and their production process to take the American experimental traditions of Alvin Curran and David Behrman into bold new realms of sonic syntax. The results are challenging yet deeply gratifying, opening wide portals to dissonant, intricately structured interzones of acoustic and electronic synthesis. In opener, 'Petrichor' Carlson uses an 11-limit just intonation system with the potential to create otoacoustic emissions - those freaky aural illusions commonly explored by Florian Hecker, and first pioneered in the sound installations of Maryanne Amacher - amidst its billowing, queered harmonics, whilst the oily synth layers and pealing clarinet tones contained in the vaulted space of 'Sharp Stones' toy with the gestural notions of modal free jazz, and 'Archipelago' beautifully brings the outside in with layered field recordings meshed to frothy modular sounds and Sielaff's airborne expressions. The unanchored 'Flight Song' similarly explores free space, and the 12 minute 'Superposition' quietly brings the LP to land with a mix of sensitive emotional meditation and meticulous editing that neatly sums up the record, and Golden Retriever's ability to to make complex ideas sound sublime.