Kassel Jaeger — Deltas
The first, “Campo del Cielo,” was commissioned for a planetarium and relays an obvious space theme, though it falls more in line with the treated drone work of the Hafler Trio than it does the dark ambient of Lustmord. All material was exclusively derived and processed from stone recordings. Historically, most stone pieces tend toward shrill frequencies emanating from crystals, but the first part of this is an extremely cold and atmospheric show that conjures up images of quartz and quarries, where giant mechanical hands rummage through piles of rough rock. A cycle of various buzzes and vibrations that change tempo and pitch eventually draws a strange narrative, perhaps about broken meteorites and the destruction of planets. The second part appropriately comes from sound filtered through a stone from the Campo del Cielo site in Northern Argentina. It continues in the format of a linear drone, creating a mineral ocean with fast changing and animated crunches of static in patterns and waves.
The second longform piece is similar though not quite as interesting. Jaeger is a member of Paris’s long-standing electro-acoustic research collective, Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), and “A Guest + A Host á”—named after a work by French surrealist Marcel Duchamp—was composed for one of their events, chiefly utilizing the Coupigny Modular Synth housed in the GRM studios. It’s an extremely vibratory piece, not too dissimilar from a mad geiger counter, tapping and clicking and conveying secret messages. Somewhat random and clinical sounding, the madness mellows into aural fractals, producing long, aerial drones like electromagnetic pulses through space. Hints of slight warmth finish out the track with hope, longing, and sadness, conjuring up a trace of humanity just long enough to bury it under a swarm of static.
Both of these pieces actually pale in comparison to the title track, the centerpiece of the album, which is shorter but much more vital than the performance pieces. It’s an uncanny approximation of the spooky dread of passing from a port at the mouth of a river out through a delta to a vast and unknown otherworld beyond. Beginning with a spiraling din of bells and crickets bleeding into a foreboding, sinister fog, it’s absolutely relentless in its darkness, much like the most recent work by Xela. Then the second wave hits, and the dark undercurrent becomes aggressive; hostile, even. At the end, the murk is engulfed in a raging fire approximated by heavily-processed guitars, a signature of Main’s Robert Hampson, who mastered the album.