Listen With Others No.8 – April 3rd 2026
1. Pax by Phillip Jeck (8’09”) 2002
“A typical Jeck composition moves at an incredibly lethargic pace through a series of looped drone tracks caught in the infinities of multiple locked grooves. As he prefers to use old records on his antique turntables, the inevitable surface noise crackles into gossamer rhythms of pulsating hiss. Occasionally, Jeck intercedes in his ghostly bricolage with a slowly rotated foreground element – a disembodied voice, a melody, or simply a fragment of non-specific sound – which spirals out of focus through a warm bath of delay.”
https://philipjeck.bandcamp.com/album/stoke
2. Spectral Malsconcities by Sarah Hennies (31’37”)
“Spectral Malsconcities (2018) consists of six linked and varied sections; it is constructed in a way that ensures the musicians are never completely in sync, and in fact they generate sounds that continually destabilise the standard ensemble goal of togetherness. As Hennies put it recently, “this piece is an example of performers elevating something beyond what I thought it could be. I wrote a piece that I thought would intentionally create mistakes. You ask somebody to repeat a very different polyrhythmic contrapuntal page of music 25 times, and it is going to fall apart at some point and then come back together. However, the musicians are so good that they played it exactly as it was written, which is better than what I thought it would have been if they were messing up…”
https://newworldrecords.bandcamp.com/album/sarah-hennies-spectral-malsconcities
3. The Disintegration Loops by William Basinski (63’33”)
“In the 1980s, Basinski constructed a series of tape loops consisting of processed snatches of music captured from an easy listening station. When going through his archives in 2001, he decided to digitise the decades-old loops to preserve them. He started a loop on his digital recorder and left it running, and when he returned a short while later, he noticed that the tape was gradually crumbling as it played. The fine coating of magnetised metal was slivering off, and the music was decaying slightly with each pass through the spindle. Astonished, Basinski repeated the process with other loops and obtained similar results.” (Pitchfork)
https://williambasinski.bandcamp.com/album/the-disintegration-loops-arcadia-archive-edition
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