The genesis of Aberration of Light is a response to one of the grander sensory-cultural experiences accessible in the 20th and 21th centuries, but it has been released on two of the humbler audio formats without betraying its core originating concept.
Composer, multi-instrumentalist, recordist, and sound-massager Olivia Block originally developed it to be the audio element of a multi-media piece devised in collaboration with visual artists Luis Recoder and Sandra Gibson. It was originally staged in movie theaters. Dimly projected, slowly changing images raised the question, is that on the screen, or just the viewer squinting? Slowly rising white noise challenged the listener to distinguish played sound from environmental sound, and what one hears from what one thinks one might be hearing.
320 kbps | 69 MB UL | RG | MC ** FLAC
But Block has allowed the piece to be released in two formats — audiocassette and digital download — that invite the listener to consider other limits.
These audio formats upend the music’s social dimension. Instead of joining scores of people gather in darkness to share spectacular extremes of sound and light, they promote solitary listening. After all, downloads and cassettes share a common genesis in the pursuit of convenient portability. They’ve each been reviled for the sonic compromises that they require or enable. While it’s possible to make tapes sound pretty good, they usually ended up being shoddily made, played on cheap devices and in circumstances of divided attention. Their recent revival is founded partly on a fetishization of such flaws. Digital files can likewise deliver an enormous amount of accurate sonic information, but are more likely to be played through shitty ear buds and subjected to intentional limiting and shaping designed to make them persistently (i.e. un-dynamically) audible when played through crappy speakers.
But what better way to get you to deal with the limits of your medium than with work designed to test the limits of perception? In the theater, the use of darkness and quietly played, ambiguous sounds heightened awareness of the interplay between intentionally trying to pay attention to something and actually perceiving it. Likewise, the hiss of tape commingles with the hiss of intentionally deployed white noise, and invites you to consider what you’re hearing, where it comes from, and why you think all of that matters. Is it what you hear that you appreciate, or the act of hearing? Play it on your phone or mp3 player through typically ill-fitting ear buds on a nighttime walk; are you hearing the bugs in your neighborhood, or field recordings of bugs, or both? What do you like more or less, and why? Here we are at the polar opposite of the original listening situation, asking the same questions; if nothing else, you have to give Aberration of Light it’s due for being a flexible heuristic tool.
But you may already have noticed the qualitative evaluations salting the last paragraph, so let’s just stop right hear and acknowledge that the listener writing this review finds Aberration of Light to be pretty marvelous. The very quietness that invites you to listen closely also primes you to be seduced by the attractiveness of its components. The white noise is like a good tapioca pudding with has just enough texture to make it interesting; the layered organ drones and sine tones speckled with static are as attractive as the last fading light of a cloudy late fall day; the long clarinet tones that bloom into longer electronic ones wrap around you like the lightest of shrouds. The movements between passages are either linked by near silence of cross-faded so you can never quite tell when they occur, anymore than you can ever tell quite when you pass from consciousness to sleep. One could easily enjoy the sensual qualities of the sounds and their transitions without ever pondering the issues proposed by the preceding paragraphs. Now how’s that for flexibility?