JOSHUA SABIN - Sutarti

With the second album from the young Scottish sound artist Joshua Sabin, Subtext returns to the terrain that has historically been most congenial to it: free, emotional electronic composition, an idiom so contemporary that it still resists classification, except by reference to the label itself, of which it is effectively a trademark.

Sabin's debut, "Terminus Drift" (2017), was in essence the worthy firstborn of "Continuum", the cornerstone work by Paul Jebanasam and still one of the peaks of the catalogue curated by James Ginzburg. From the opening, skilful exploration of that "aesthetics of collapse," the new "Sutarti" pointedly takes its distance, partly absorbing the lesson of the elusive "Clear Stones" in its search for a deep dialogue between the art of soundscaping and unusual sound sources from the field of ethnomusicology.

As part of the far-sighted RE:VIVE programme promoted by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, which is devoted specifically to the artistic reworking of archival materials, Sabin was invited to Lithuania to closely study the documentation of Baltic musical folklore. Beyond the instruments typical of folk tradition, such as the violin and the skudučiai (a variant of the panpipe), the greatest fascination for Sabin came from the vocal polyphonies known as sutartinė (a term translatable as the reflexive verb "to listen to one another"). The peculiarity of this vocal form lies in its diaphonies or descants, that is, in the second intervals separating the voices, typically two to four, often producing dissonances, as well as in the repetition of a few words and melodic cells.

Sabin's electronic manipulation retains only the most essential traits of these elements: skeletons of harmonies, abstracted and recontextualised in an airy, sacred dimension, traversed more by echoes and shadows than by actual recognisable motifs. The six tracks thus define an imaginary space with an extremely fragile framework, a chamber of molecular transformation where individual sounds deform and thin out, often ending up dissolving into gaseous states.

If, on the one hand, the fourth movement marks the "volumetric" epicentre of the suite, with muffled thuds and sharp screeches in unstable tonalities, the fifth movement drifts for long minutes in a gentle desolation, as luminous in the delicate sweeps of vibrated strings as in the silences that punctuate them. This is undoubtedly the expressive peak of Sabin's work, a sublimating prayer that culminates in the melancholy breath of the sixth and final segment, mindful of the most rarefied dreamlike states of Hammock.

Already moving briskly in the direction of his label mates, Joshua Sabin asserts the transfiguring power of the sound designs that distinguish the Subtext "school," stamping his own signature on a work deeper and more elaborate than it first appears. The liminal dimension of "Sutarti" is not immediately accessible; it demands the same devotion to the sonic experience that inspired it in the first place. It goes without saying that, on this condition alone, the effort will be duly rewarded.

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09/08/2019