Description
This album is the third in a series of experiments exploring the magnification of the insignificant sounds. The chaotic but inherently repetitive patterns created by the interaction between the objects has been realised through a minimum of gestural action by way of a number of distancing strategies, such as the use of hand drills, film winders and motorised drills/screwdrivers.
Astasie-abasie is a project of Ian Andrews which evolved out of a long running performance collaboration with Garry Bradbury. The project focuses on the amplification of small sounds (following the approach of John Cage, Gordon Mumma and David Tudor) through the capture of sounds generated by small objects by way of contact microphones, home constructed cartridges, miniature piezo microphones and conventional microphones. Various devices are used as constraints in order to distance any performing gesture of the artist from the compositional process. The compositional process is, in this sense, aleatory and close to automatic. Much like field recording, sounds are found rather than performed or manipulated. Modified, or ‘prepared’ turntables are often used to bring about the sounds, after which any editing of the material is kept to a minimum. “Vestigial Gamelan” is the third instalment in Astasie-abasie’s Gamelan series, following “Elliptical Gamelan” (2022) and “Molecular Gamelan” (2021).
Ian Andrews works across a number of disciplines including film and video, sculpture, installation and collage, poetry and writing, in order to explore questions relating to utopia and modernism, technologies and the post-human. The work attempts—via a strategy of deconstruction and collage, and the critical juxtaposition of appropriated materials—to locate the point of fracture in discourses of power and discursive regimes, and put into question the organising structures, and break the syntax of the accepted sedimented frameworks that keep thought rigid and ultimately hold us to ransom. His contribution to Australian experimental music reaches back to the early 1980s, including projects like The Horse He’s Sick, Kurt Volentine, Cut with the Kitchen Knife and countless others.
“The most important thing is the music’s random nature, which I greatly enjoy. Think of wind chimes, rattling in the wind, but here, the chimes are broken and make a lot of different sounds, unlike the different tunings of a wind-chime. It all rattles about, and if you listen close, you can detect some organisation. It’s difficult to say how much of this is ‘played’ or the result of automated actions and how much editing is done. Astasie-abase opts for short pieces, all eleven around three minutes and within each of these, there is not only a lot happening, but there are also many variations throughout this record. Much of this happens on a mid-frequency range; some on a more low-end range, like they added a bass drum to the proceedings. In the two previous [Astasie-abasie album] reviews, I used the word Zen-like, and there is no reason not to do so again,” – Vital Weekly 1471
Limited edition of 100 vinyl records with locked grooves on each side.
