On ITERAE, American musician/engineer Joseph Branciforte and Belgian Fender Rhodes player Jozef Dumoulin operate in the spaces in between. Each of this profoundly immersive recording’s eight tracks is a negotiation between spontaneous generation and sustained refinement; solid form and plastic transformation; analog and digital hardware.
The originating impulse for ITERAE came from Branciforte’s appreciation for Dumoulin’s solo music. Intrigued by his ability to freely transcend the Rhodes electric piano’s familiar sounds, Branciforte asked the Belgian to stop by his studio for some spontaneous playing. They recorded for two days, each performing on a Rhodes and outboard effects, then let the music sit for a couple years before Branciforte started combing the recordings for malleable material. He and Dumoulin ultimately broke five hours of improvisation into a little more than an hour of finished music.
The album’s title clues the listener into the process. Bits of music were drawn out, looped and otherwise transformed, then fed back into the original playing, again and again. At some points, they preserved their keyboards’ distinctly squeezable timbre, but they also turned notes into sputtering static, buoyant ribbons of zero-g sound and pinging resonations that wouldn’t sound out of place on the soundtrack to a movie set inside a submarine. This music has been intensely worked over, but it betrays none of the sweat and screen time expended upon its creation. Its pulsations evince both mechanical and corporeal qualities, flickering stroboscopically within a coolly lit, respiratory space that invites the listener to drift, suspended but aware of its ongoing evolution.
Since Branciforte is both artist and label boss, he had the freedom to fashion a package that’s as distinctive as the music it delivers. Greyfade has come at the matter of whether a physical object makes a worthwhile companion to organized sound from different angles by releasing nicely produced LPs, exclusively digital editions and hardcover books with texts that analyze accompanying digital downloads. For ITERAE, Branciforte has gone back to an old love: the compact disc. The physical edition comes in an LP-sized sleeve, die-cut to display four mini-CDs on one side (which between them contain the whole album) and one familiar standard-size disc on the other. You can interact with the album every quarter hour, put it on repeat until your house’s fuses blow or treat it as an art object, since it’s also equipped with a hook that enables you can hang it on your wall. [Greyfade]
—Bill Meyer
