MYSTERY SEA 51 CD (Belgium, 2009)

TRACKS

01. dispersion trajectory
02. membrane formation
03. spectral remnants

INFO

Three tracks of moderate fluctuations of sound in temporal space, infected by the occasional far from equilibrium interventions to diversify the stasis. Research notes: Most structural compositions of phase inversion have focused on slow shifts in macrotonal formations, while the rich microstructure has received little independent attention. Presented here is a mystified and emotive soundscape of possible microstructures formed on the basis of margin transformations, kinetic ties, and spatial considerations. Special attention is given to the microstructural features resulting from a three-stage phase separation. Subsequently, these considerations are extended to the microstructure of the inner ear and that of its corresponding neurocellular boundaries. Finally, the features of actual phase inversion structures are heard, imagined and hence interpreted. Phase inversion can be regarded as a form of the instability in the composer, the stability of the process being least at the point of mental projection. On the other hand, knowledge of the phase inversion point is essential in the preparation of dispersions in order to obtain the desired listening effect. The fundamental difficulty in understanding phase inversion lies in the problem of conceptualising the actual mechanism behind the process. Various recording and sound assembly methods are used to generate a trajectory in phase space, which samples from a chosen array of possibilities. This constitutes the random motion of the sounds within the dispersion lattice.

REVIEWS

For Mystery Sea, John Grzinich has plunged deep into its own creative process to come back with “phase inversion”, an haunting & soothing thorough sound litany… Sinking slowly within, oscillating slightly, in a continuous imperturbable movement at the heart of an unseen core lies a point of entry, a source of multiple diffractions… Rubbings, vesperal sighs, microcollisions, metallic asperities, elemental debris, tiny fragments recombine in a wordless score… “phase inversion” turns things upside down, makes Below becoming the Above, draws a precise, refined outline where each detail is like the echo of a new path… a cognitive retraction… > Daniel of MS

Review by Brian Olewnick, from Just Outside

John Grzinich’s Phase Inversion is a giant murmuring, always on the verge of blooming, though largely because it seems always to be fading, growing darker the deeper it dives, where steel scrapes and gray glitches break its surface and paradoxically makes the cold, barren atmosphere more intimate. If the climate of three works here is somewhat cryptic, it is a good deal more inescapable. Pieces pass with an incessant, circular motion, but it’s a motion done on the spot, heading nowhere. The first selection is the strongest. A solemn undertow spaded with placid tones hovers in the distance. A deceptively mischievous manner appears to hold it in place, though steadily it encroaches, not so much transforming as revealing a network of growling mechanical distortions occasionally pocked with echoing synthetic pings. The closing pair of works are hewn from the same dark matter, but their rubbings are more feint, corroded, as though they now stood at a certain distance from themselves. As fine as they are, there is a sense in which they aren’t quite heavy enough to fully make good on the potential of the albums initial stirrings. This remains, still, a fine example of Grzinich’s never overwhelming, but far from benevolent, rattling streams of sonic distillation.
Max Schaefer http://www.cyclicdefrost.com/blog/?p=3213

jgrzinich is a name that’s been hovering around the edges of my attention for quite some time now but it took the ever wonderful Mystery Sea label to finally wave him in front of me. Phase Inversion is a set of three contrasting compositions. The first, ‘Dispersion Trajectory’, is a long undulating drone marked by the addition of skitteringly amorphous insectile sounds. The second, ‘Membrane Formation’, is a melding of washing tone and drone with clattering and sawing instrumentation and the third, ‘Spectral Remnants’, is a short, gentle set of gong-like tonal ripples. I found the first to be a little too cold and remote for my tastes the slow addition of the scuttling extra sounds helps open the track up but I prefer a little more warmth in my music. The second is easily my favourite track here. It seems fairly minimal in it’s strategies but there’s a humanity to it’s composition that envelops the listener. The final track offers a small coda to the album that’s perfectly formed and full of interest but is a little too brief to fully immerse oneself in. If I have seemed a little negative towards this album then I apologise. It’s fair to say that Phase Inversion isn’t my favourite album this month as, for the most part, it all feels a little too clinical for my tastes and I struggling to hear the composers personality but, it is extremely well made and most definitely a worthwhile listen as are all Mystery Sea releases.
- Ian Holloway from Wonderful Wooden Reasons

Among the genuine masters of this game, acquired Estonian John Grzinich gives a showing of his strength with a gorgeous accumulation of drones and found objects, the latter mostly verging on the softly metallic/distantly clattering side of concreteness. The record presents exactly what was expected, this commentator well acquainted with a good number of the artist’s past releases (published on the best labels in this field, from Cut to Sirr, to Elevator Bath – you name it, he’s been there); yet there’s something distinguishing his work which is called class. I don’t know how to explain it, this has probably to do with a deeper perception of the vibrating particles of a particular source, or the shape of a chosen environment, or maybe just comes from a highly developed inner ear. A Jgrzinich drone sounds dissimilar from a regular buzzing hum: it appears more like the layering of a thousand desolate murmurs bathed in amniotic liquid.

The static façade hides hundreds of inherent movements, muted throbs, sub-harmonic changes that nevertheless make the whole sound as an immobile stifled choir, silently spreading resonances which, in conjunction with the dissipating energies represented by those faraway rattles and clangs, represent a memento of how to behave ourselves in front of the vague, a symbol of the unconcern we should always demonstrate when the worst is approaching, be it the fear of an uncertain future or the sheer notion of death. Perhaps a record like Phase Inversion could help someone to get in touch with that inside dimension which is inevitably left aside when one is intent in “living” by filling the brain with figments of imagination and innumerable illusions, only to be given a final bill at the end, still ill-equipped and even more frightened.

In actual fact, life itself is a phase inversion. On the contrary, many people are convinced of giving lessons to others, not realizing that what they believe to have “invented” is just the chewed-up remnant of a truth that everybody sees in a wholly individual way – all of them completely wrong – and that will finally rape everyone’s abstruse beliefs concerning human evolution and a presumed afterlife – not to mention reincarnation – except for the obvious transformation of the corporal matter into food for worms (or ash, if you’re sophisticated enough) and energy into some substance that might be useful or less, according to the quintessence of that erstwhile “being”.
- Massimo Ricci

If the staunch trajectory of Phase Inversion is a testament to anything, it is that John Grzinich cares about the environments that he is so evidently finely tuned into. I can picture him traversing Estonia where he now resides, painstakingly seeking out freshly discarded materials, ransacking through a post-industrial squat for objects to clang together, testing the acoustic parameters of a newly discovered sonic environment. And in all honesty, if he were to call you up one day to partake in an organic matter and sheet metal jam within the walls of a hollowed out geodesic dome… you’d be foolish to refuse. Like all his work, nicely done. -Adrian Dziewanski of Sacrapyard Forecast

Cut 018 , Switzerland (2006)

1. Cast
2. Weald
3. Glaze

info

The three compositions on Gyre were formed from varied location-based sound actions, which were then processed and composed in the studio. These acoustic recordings bear the trace of empty barns, forests, fields and hills. Material origins of wood, glass, air and metal are transformed into abstraction. The result balances tangibility with disassociation, focused microscopy with breathy expanse, and raw physicality with ghostly glimmer.

Cast sources recorded at Bard studios, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, summer 2005 by SN.
Material for Weald and Furl recorded in Mooste, Estonia autumn 2005 by JG/SN.
Additional material for Weald recorded in Saaropera, Estonia by JG (with mnortham and Koz).

First mix of Gyre presented as 4 channel sound piece for Correnti Sonore 05, Tarcento Italy.

the ‘gyre’ forest in estonia

reviews

This is the point where sound art and traditional Western composition slowly converge.
Thank god for the internet! Let’s forget about those cultural pessimists for a while, who see the free dissemination and publication of art as a problem, not a blessing. But aside from the question, whether there can ever be too much music, the digital data highway has allowed for some collaborations, which would never have seen the light of day only two decades ago. Such as with Seth Nehil and John Grzinich, who have kept their artistic bond intact, despite putting it to a strong geographical test. With Nehil residing in Portland, where, among other activities, he publishes the “FO A RM” magazine on sound art and Grzinich working at the center for art and social practice in Estonia, the distance between them on the map has never been bigger. Yet the homogeneity of their joint work has increased accordingly.

“Gyre”, in fact, never sounds like a collision or a battle, but more like the result of two different minds working on the same wavelength, complementing one another and filling in the blanks. In three pieces of between ten and almost twenty minutes length, the duo totally encapsulates the listener with sound, building up a world, which label owner Jason Kahn accurately describes as “acoustic recordings (…) transformed into abstraction”. While the opening “Cast” still offers some harmonic guidance, with little drops of rain trickling into the picture and subaquatic murmurs moaning behind a transcendental drone, which breathes like a static choir, the remaining tracks entirely turn to processed field recordings: Gentle knocks on wood, grinding stones, distant rumblings, metal being hit, birds chirping and objects drifting inside a liquid-filled basin in “Weald” and smouldering and crackling noises, as well as impressions of a lonely worker in a huge warehouse on “Furl”. And yet, “Gyre” is never satisfied with merely presenting all of these recordings and of using them as a showcase for the possibilities of technological treatment. In all cases, the source material has been moulded into a flowing piece of music with subtle changes, multiple layers.of aural events and a vast deepness. Behind the natural appearance of these compositions lurks a galaxy of infinite proportions, an endless pit of hollow structures, which lend them a majestic.aura. Just like one were stepping into a thousand year old cathedral, the mystery remains wordless and intangible. If the mooing of a cow can equal a chord change, if a drop of water can resonate like a melody and if an empty barn can take the place of an orchestra, then this is the point where sound art and traditional Western composition slowly converge.

It should be amply clear, that this kind of music takes up a space of its own and does not require for its actors to be in the same room at the same time. It therefore bears no surprise, that this album, despite its closeness, was mixed and remixed in three different countries. Still, as the air-line distance was increasing, Nehil and Grzinich could have easily lost sight of each other and have gone their separate ways. The internet and regular mail prevented that and made “Gyre” possible. Again: Thank god for that.
By Tobias Fischer for Tokafi

For more than a decade Seth Nehil and John Grzinich work together, playing highly processed acoustic recordings of them playing together. You can imagine them sitting together in the woods, in a cave or on the top of a hill with a small array of wood, glass or metal, and producing sounds with that. The natural acoustics also play a role: the acoustic space or the wind or the rain. Recordings of such pieces are combined together in the studio and formed into lengthy pieces of drone music. ‘Gyre’ is their third release, following ‘Stria’ (see Vital Weekly 360) and ‘Confluence’ (see Vital Weekly 353), which were companion releases. On ‘Gyre’ we find three of these pieces, in which the environment sinks into the playing of the musicians, such as in ‘Cast’, which has the rumbling of acoustic objects, gradually fading over into the sounds of wind and rain. The drone music of Nehil and Jgrzinich may not have changed since their first two releases, but it’s quite still a highly captivating journey and a strong, personal view of drone music. That makes this most worthwhile.
- Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly, 7.2006

“Gyre” implies circling, an ambit of some kind. The best parts here orbit around the listener, never quite providing a steady handhold but always enticing one in deeper. A strong recording, well worth hearing. – Brian Olewnick
full review on bagatellen >>

Seth Nehil and John Grzinich are two sound artists, both having worked with audio and video on various CD´s, performances and exhibitions. “Gyre” is their third collaborative release and was recorded in Finland, Estonia and Italy.
The facts sorted out, it´s time to write about their recordings, which were composed using location-based “sound actions” which were later shaped in the studio. On the first track, this sounds like a combination of processed field recordings and improvised playing on found, self-made or imported items whose sound could best be compared to rhythmic instruments like the Kalimba. A hollow and gusty drone forms the backbone, over which Nehil and Grzinich “play”, scratch and shake these items. The duo manages well to build a tense atmosphere and structure their elements in a way that keeps the listener attentive.
full review by Stephan Bauer, Foxy Digitalis, 10.2006 >>

Gyre is highly textural music, almost palpable in the way it inspires visions in the mind’s eye. Like the dream world’s reconfiguration of familiar artifacts, Gyre spins a web of hallucinatory sound forms, and to the mind that’s willing to enter, the album’s ambience can be quite enveloping. Users of field recordings are sometimes said to play their environments, and for Nehil and jgriznich , this statement might be applicable. But what seems more appropriate is the idea that the duo are not just playing their surroundings, but redefining the context in which they’re heard. The duo don’t engage their recordings passively, and they’re in constant interaction with their environments, both during the recording process and in the studio. Luckily, the album is as immersive for the listener as it likely was for the artists.
full review by Adam Strohm on Fake Jazz >>

Gyre was originally presented as a four-channel sound piece for Correnti Sonore 05, Tarcento Italy. Seth Nehil and John Grzinich recorded the source material in New York and Estonia through 2005, and the resulting three pieces all cleave fairly strongly to post-processed, gently dislocated field recording “composition.” It’s not exactly an under-populated field, and at times Gyre struggles to distinguish itself from similarly-minded recordings. The duo are fascinated with resonance, tracing and testing the properties of spaces through “sound actions” and then building new architectures through juxtaposition and a cool editing hand. These recordings offer a kind of psychogeographic hauntology, the displacement caused by manipulation rendering the original spaces somehow absent, yet present: you’re constantly trailing an idea of an origin without recourse to any “real” referent. Nehil and Grzinich are smart composers, though they do often rely on wind-tunnel atmospherics as scaffolds for their compositions: not a bad thing, but they sometimes risk over-homogenising their creations.
Jon Dale, Paris Transatlantic Weekly, 9.2006

Gyre is a sound art project which investigates, and then renders abstract, acoustic experiences of place and location. The collaboration of Seth Nehil and jgrzinich has no doubt been informed by the vast distance which separates their homes in, respectively, Oregon and south east Estonia. The pair work acoustic material from “empty barns, forests, fields and hills” into heavily processed passages. The process is most recognizable in “Weald”: sparse, echoing taps and gongs sketch out the contours of their surroundings, as they ring and report back from distant surfaces. But Nehil and jgrzinich also invert such notions. For “Cast”, they use their source sounds not to imply or describe any kind of space, but to build a gathering slew of thickly textured sound, which enters into the listener’s space like a concrete object.
Sam Davies -The Wire, Oct. 06

contact mics on old oil tanks

seth experimenting with an improvised wire installation

deep in the forest

the glass jars heard on ‘glaze’

the composers before the performance in Tarcento, Italy

photos by jgrzinich

For many years now one of the main ways I’ve been able to get releases by other artists is to share through trades, usually with my own releases. For the most part this is a great system not only because it helps me hear what others are doing, but also because it puts me in direct contact with the people I’m sharing with. I really appreciate others willingness to trade. There is also a practical reason for trading due to the fact that there are no shops near where I live. I could order from online shops or catalogues , but shipping and payment methods are costly.

Since I started this weblog earlier this year I’ve been thinking about writing “reviews” of some of the CDs I receive from other artists. I put the word “reviews” here in quotes because I’m not actually interested in writing reviews in the normal journalistic sense. Rather it is more using writing as a form for expressing my impressions of what I hear in the sound work I listen to. How is this different from a review? Well I don’t imagine that my audience is a magazine reader or is specifically a potential buyer. What I write can be anything from direct references to what I hear to stories about the artist (if I know them), or simply ideas or thoughts I had while listening. In general it does show “what I like”, but on the other hand I simply don’t have the time or energy for the things I’m not so interested in. Yes, this is very much a personal approach, but then again that usually what blogs are for. I don’t expect it will be interesting to all. Mainly it can be a curiosity for the artist and a possible point at which to start a dialogue related to the work (see my review of Seth Nehil’s ‘Amnionic Site’). At best it can serve as some form of feedback, something I don’t feel there is enough of.

As a policy I’m not going to make any formal system for reviews, so don’t send me any CDs unless we arrange a fair trade first.

As many know I have collaborated for more than a decade with Seth Nehil and what follows is a collection of impressions upon listening to his most recent release for Alluvial Records.

I’ve been big on text the last few years… There are no liner notes on this release, no accompanying images (an original drawing on the cover?), no profile of the artist, not even any technical credits. The only extraneous info we find apart from the artist name, album title and label is “composed 2004-2006″ and a short and direct instruction at the end of the circular inscription on the disc, “play loud”. Now normally I don’t encourage instructional use of a listening object, but in this case if it were the only piece of information relating to a CD release it can be something of an essential link to the work itself. But it’s not the only piece of information. We are also given a time frame and I’m actually wondering why. While this work may have technically been “composed” (not more?) from 2004-2006, it certainly contains a conceptual and emotional depth accumulated over a much greater period of time. Lets say Amnemonic Site is a work that has matured (fermented?) from an array of elaborate exercises in sound experimentation.

I had the pleasure to hear earlier versions of some of the tracks on this CD as well as other compositions in progress by Seth over the last few years. My consistent comments were along the lines of “slow down… its too much… the density is extreme… are you trying to prove something?”. These comments were not meant to introduce conservative measures in the musical sense. These comments were to raise more difficult issues concerning what, in this case, was the composer trying to express to the listener? Even as a colleague of 10 or more years I still felt left out and wondering at some essential message beneath the barrage of sounds. I was hearing a variety of repeated gestures and impacts, not only of various materials sounding out within a plethora of internal and external spaces, but of an author who wished to reveal the very idea of what the sounding object means to those who open their ears to listen. I was hearing layer upon layer of dense intertwined tonalities weaving endlessly in layers that age with the feeling of life and death of organic membranes. I was hearing hearing hidden voices buried under echos of distant urban spectacles as well as instruments that exist only in the sphere of electronically manipulated signals. I was hearing layered treatments of these elements drifting in and out of cognition, then recognition. I was brought beyond a threshold that seemingly was insisted upon.

At the same time there was the outside world of the potential viewer. There is my space and your space mingling with the emerging web of local, national and international identities and the formless sticky glue seemingly holding this together, electronic media. One issue that guides all perspectives in this brave new world is that of saturation, where ones personal threshold is targeted relentlessly by the weapon with the strongest signal. Too add density, even in the artistic sense, to a potentially over-saturated mind  is a risky thing. My concern with the composer was over a struggle all too personal to make a “statement” beyond the work itself in the ensuing world. In the sound world one never knows exactly how to make a statement unless its an accent to something else or an added piece built upon an already existing genre, style or class of music. While this is always an accessible potential for some it my be a threat, to face the pressure of having to make a statement when none may be inherent in the work, even if its for the sake of a mere sense of recognition.

My hope is that this work will get “recognized”, not by status or qualification but by those who seek to “listen”. May these listeners not get lost within the sea of sounds that pervade our senses in the most contemporary way (in the most formless way). I also will give one lone instruction like that of the one found on this disk, “listen”, however loud or soft you want. Without listening you will not hear. If you do not hear, you cannot act. You will be unable to react to any phenomenon beyond the limitations of the ordered world, where objects are dead and music has little meaning (other than a label to attach to a fragmented lifestyle sold to you as mold of what you endlessly desire to be). You will not know what it means to visit the Amnemonic Site of Seth Nehil, a place wholly apart from the world of reason and reference, and a place entirely immersed in sensual feeling and tactile expressions of Sound in the widest sense. However personal this “site” is, it is a place to be shared as openly as the energy of sound itself, unrestricted from borders of immediate space. Its presence  comes from lived experience, collected objects, material actions and a dialogue with the immediacy of space. The path to this site reveals a structure that is connected as an embodied being of living tissue as much as the discarded remains of the past…