A fitting subject to exercise your deep listening, each layer across “Imagery” is selected with extreme discretion—the characteristic minimalist caution of spiritually authentic Dub. Each sound form is whittled down like a handmade shiv to serve a precise function in the internal pulsing rhythms across this Dusk Notes release.
Somewhere over a dune, a wave breaks on the shore: a fittingly bicoastal image for this self-titled “Imagery” collaboration between NYC based-Cory Metzinger and San Francisco-based Jordan Poling. Patterns change form and phase in natural processes of self-replication, mutating slightly as they transfer substrates. The prevailing nautical wind activates bells and chimes in pulses that learned their language from the ocean. Later on, the top percussive layers ebb like legions of hatching metallic locusts in and out under the same gentle gravitational guidance as the tides.
There’s a wonderful organic evolution to the deep grooves that feels like watching a time-lapse of natural phenomena in motion. The translation and preservation of the richness of live hardware, and the wonderful surprises of nanosecond glitches and occasional crackle of amplified minuscule voltage spikes, is no easy feat. The raw charge of live machines often loses some dimension of character in the process of rendering something permanent—a loss attributable to the formalin-effect of each stage of compression algorithms— a resampling and reformatting that any music must endure before it reaches our ears. But they manage, and it sounds as alive as it must have in the process of creation.
The intricacy with which rhythms evolve over the envelope of longer timescale structure rewards listening more deeply and giving it more of your attention. In a sense, it is being a willing accomplice to the hypnotic potential of borderline psychoactive grooves. One imagines the unpredictable mathematical beauty of patterns projected into lower dimensions by higher order machinations.
The release obeys the basic narrative arc of a live DJ set, building towards that dark locomotive pulse of “Asymmetric Information,” where errant periodic pulsar emissions are scrambled with long-distance radiofrequency distress signals, warped by gravitational lensing. The closer, “Don’t Crush The Acid,” rises like the tuning of an orchestra; a warbling irregular groove shaken awake by increasingly frenetic splices of jungle.
-Winston Mann
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