blackbody_radiation — Ultra-Materials
[Faitiche — 2023]★★★★★
Reviewed 17 July 2023by Colin Lang
Search for sound masking and you’re likely to stumble upon a host of corporate-minded demonstration videos marketing the technology as a means to improve the acoustic ecology of workplace environments by effectively combatting two separate but interrelated problems: lack of noise, such that one is able to hear everything and the other side of that coin (i.e., being too loud, so no one can productively accomplish their tasks). The idea is that the imperceptible injection of noise measured at the right frequency and amplitude will assure that neither of these ubiquitous problems of space and hearing will get in the way of a job well done.
It is a reversal of some intelligence and subtle cunning to highlight the nature of sound masking in a musical context as blackbody_radiation (aka Andrew Black) does on his first release under the moniker, Ultra-Materials, by essentially removing the context and leveling background and foreground into an even plane of ambient textures. The six compositions that make up the album are, with one exception, pretty lengthy, and each, in their own way, highlights a genuine structural problem specific both to sound masking and to the nature of field recording more generally (of which Black is an avowed practitioner): namely, the production, or re-production, of an existing space.
This sounds exceedingly categorical, but it’s actual foundational, fundamental, even, as any and all field recordings build imagined connections between their subjects and the output that passively records them. The transport of such experiences is predicated on a belief that such translation is discernible, hearable, and that the recordings are the documented proof of such a belief system, its core principle, I am willing to argue. Sound masking puts the credulity of such recording and listening into question, whether we like it or not, and what Black has managed to accomplish over his string of ambient, granular, frustratingly anticlimactic compositions, is the careful excision of any center, any reliable or believable context around which his source material might revolve. Try as one might, there is no anchor, no core on Ultra-Materials, which makes it both compelling and altogether creepy (disappearance has never been more tangible). Once we get to the final track, “Particle Float”, a modicum of repetition and something like a musical structure emerges. Not sure if it had been there all along.
For fans of granular, ambient field recordings free of human voice or interference. Or for those avid collectors who hold on to their Smithsonian Folkways Sounds of the Office, Ultra-Materials and its sound masking is a properly dystopian update to the roster of the former’s contemporary office machinery.
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