JAMES GINZBURG - Six Correlations

After such an intense and significant year as the last, it's understandable that in 2018 the Subtext catalogue slowed its pace somewhat, hosting only the brief debut of the moniker Xin and this new (and first real) solo project from James Ginzburg, co-founder of the label and one half of Emptyset, from whose Ep of a year ago ("Skin") this album seems to take its cue and develop further.

"Six Correlations" not only has a particular link to the Scottish origins of Ginzburg's family, but in the artist's intentions it becomes conceptually "a response to the disappearance of nature as much as of non-digital culture", in an attempt to rethink "a harmonious relationship between the organic and the technological".

After the long opening built on a single note, a horizontal expanse dominated - as it is later too - by the rough, pervasive trails of the Roland SH-101, the sonic bed intersects with the deep rhythms of the Indian shruti, similar to those of Turkish percussionist Cevdet Erek ("If To Pause", "A Patterned, Returned"), a blend that distinctly recalls the debut of Fuck Buttons.

To the solemn tolling of the piano are then added voices evoking tribal ritualism ("Of Glass Reversal", "- Reflects"), elements of a powerful yet faintly melancholic multiethnic scenario, gathering together voices and sounds lost in time. The finale loops back to the beginning with a continuous drone and an electronic refrain that evokes precisely the imposing drone of bagpipes, underlining the project's grounding in Gaelic tradition.

Ginzburg displays a vision that is equally coherent as both musician and curator, evolving the rigid conceptual premises and the aesthetic of differential repetition that marks Emptyset into a sonic entity which, like so many other albums on the English label, seems to possess its own inner "breath", a beating heart that so much contemporary electronic music appears to have lost along the way.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

07/11/2018