“With its name and with its lineaments of highly resonant harmonics, Grey Canyon Echo conjures the nuanced stratigraphy of an old geologic formation. Extending this metaphor, the video’s spectral analysis similarly cuts a section through Grey Canyon Echo’s timbral strata revealing its vertical and horizontal organization. (The Fast Fourier Transform was, after all, Geologic before it was Sonographic.) The video’s base map is also a transect, recorded during a 2014 research project documenting the variation in land cover types across Colorado’s vast terrain.” — Robert Gerard Pietrusko
The album…
Hands In The Dark presents Distortion Hue, American composer Byron Westbrook’s follow-up LP to 2017’s Body Consonance, his previous LP for the label. Where Body Consonance focused on gesture and movement, Distortion Hue is grounded in catharsis and gut emotion. Its ten tracks of tape-manipulated electronics present a more raw side of Westbrook’s work, with grainy and damaged textures, walls of feedback and non-metered pulses. The album shows a wide range of expressiveness; pieces like “Heavy Weather”, “Tunnel Visioning” and “Electric Blued” capture the deep anxiety of the present moment while “Refraction Haze” and “Ricochet Waves” have flashes of hope amidst their chaos. With a nod to rock minimalism as well as to his mentor Phill Niblock’s sonic material approach, Distortion Hue is heavy in weight; a complex and layered deep listening experience.