Collaborative works in electronic music are the stuff of legends, though by the nature of the field are rarely long-lasting. Clashing egos, lifestyles, and ideas often get the better of fastest friends, leaving many of these projects stillborn or with only a taste of possibilities. In the case of regarded sound designer Albert van Abbe and Olaf Bender, best known as IDM legend Byetone, the linkup actually arose purely by accident, the result of meeting while working side by side at Willem Twee Studio, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands.
Two veteran producers on the leftfield side of electronic music with long, varied discographies and as much in common as what separates them in their approaches, it was helped along by van Abbe’s regard for Raster-Noton’s history and accomplishments. Even more interestingly, this period also resulted in “Nondual”, van Abbe’s most searching solo album to date.
For years, Albert van Abbe made an array of works under various aliases, running the gamut from filthy Hague-strength acid to sound art. The impressive techno made under his own name on his No Comment and Vanabbe labels remained consistently underrated and often featured equally breathtaking remixes from legendary art techno figures matching the quality of the tracks they reinterpreted. Years later, they remain compelling pieces, a product of the high intensity, synaesthesia-inducing sound sculpting flowing through them. This particular, sound design-heavy techno fits well with the Dutch ambient techno legacy, resisting the urge to draw too much attention to itself while, upon close inspection, outclassing others in detail, intensity, and execution.
“Nondual” redresses being placed on the borders of established genres by ignoring genre itself—a fitting approach for a composer whose work spreads itself across so many areas. There’s nothing succinctly techno here and often very little in the way of beats or drum machines at all, which lays focus squarely upon the highly expressive sound sculpting resting at the center of the album. The pieces are quite brief, under 4 minutes mostly with some in the 1-2 minute range, but it plays like an album designed as such. It’s both harsher than most of his other work—check the industrial blasts of noise on ‘At All (Atma)’—and also more beautiful and subtle, like the gorgeous atmospheres of his techno tracks stripped of their rhythmic backbones so only textured pads, thin melodies, and stringlike sounds remain, plus the airborne pianos that permeate this album. When, as in the closing title piece or in ‘The Body The Body,’ a regular beat dominates, it’s still suffused in ambient detail with IDM introspection and twitchiness. Titles hint at the album’s theme of nonduality; a concept stating that behind the multiplicity of objects, others, and selves, we are a single indivisible reality.
“Dual” asserts itself immediately with electro-leaning breakbeats, often in odd time signatures, familiar from Byetone’s discography. At first van Abbe seems almost invisible, slinking towards the subtlety of his previous techno works, but it’s quickly apparent there’s more here than initially obvious. Rhythms and sounds morph and shift unexpectedly, and again the relative brevity of the pieces—mostly around 5 minutes—and the album work to its advantage. It’s obviously improvised but truly retains the separate signatures of the artists at the controls, with van Abbe’s meticulous ambient sound building gradually, winning out over Bender’s rhythmic frameworks as it progresses through the 7 pieces. Never the most prolific, it’s refreshing to hear Byetone stretching out at length for the first time since his blinding 2011 “Symeta”. Unlike that album’s highlights, you won’t hear these caned on nearby dance floors. It reaches peak evocativeness with penultimate ‘I am sure one day I will go again’, then evaporates into complex, beatless synthesizer sculptures on the closer which would fit perfectly into van Abbe’s “Nondual”. Nonduality indeed, and a possible proof of that concept uniting these two fascinating, complimentary works.
-Albert Freeman
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