Genre: Noise / Ambient / Experimental

01 Brannon Construct 1
02 Particles
03 SW 9 Variant
04 Red Pink and Blue 2
05 Brannon Construct 2
06 Chirps and Oscillations
07 Beer Can Pulse
08 Instability
09 SW 14 Chs
10 TFiller
11 Brannon Construct 3
12 Red Pink and Blue 3

Having previously reviewed Mystified’s ‘M’ two-disc set I was expecting good things of this CD and once again I was not to be disappointed. Thomas J. Park’s expertise in handling and understanding noise and sound were similarly very much in evidence as they were on the ‘M’ release, and his unerring ability to create stories, moods and atmospheres with just a few well-chosen sounds and treatments is as strong and as well-developed as ever.

Parks works with a broad palette, utilising everything from cold icy ambience and environmental sounds, to glitchy rhythms and treated sounds, all carefully pieced together to achieve the right effect, as any artists worth the epithet does. The treatment is often minimalist, but it’s the accumulative effect that brings it all together and imparts the impression of complexity. Swoops, drones, whistles, repetitive rhythmical figures, voices, birdsong, whooshes, and jet engines, in themselves mundane, familiar and unremarkable, when extrapolated from their natural surroundings and contexts, and then treated, transformed, mutilated, stretched, distorted, chopped and changed and finally layered together with sounds not normally associated with them, take on a wholly different meaning, leading us to listen anew. This is Parks’ innate speciality, his sonic wizardry, but unlike the one in Oz this particular wizard doesn’t obfuscate with knavery or trickery – it’s a genuine magical talent.

Take the ‘Brannon Construct’ suite – vast engines and machines defying the human scale, going about their mysterious and autonomous business without reference to mankind. Or the ‘Red Pink and Blue’ twosome, created in conjunction with the UK’s Ghoul Detail, minimalist backgrounds with highlights of even more minimalist drones and burbles overlaid, an impersonal inspection from a cold impersonal electronic gaze. Other highlights: the swirling grating of the title track like some hungry bug waiting to feed on you; the looped glitch beat of ‘Particles’ as atoms like tiny birds gyrate and dance; and finally the quiet ebb and flow of ‘Chirps and Oscillations’, shortwave fluxes set against a tribal rhythm, a broadcast from some far-flung outpost of civilisation.

Once again Parks has woven his magic spell, weaving tales from the warp and weft of the sonic materials at his disposal, and entrancing us with the alien, the weird, the grotesque and the bizarre. This is one story I’ll continue to want to hear again and again.