loopool — Steaming

Well, here’s a joy to review: an eight hour long mp3 on a cdr. Its from loopool, and its packaged very simply with a card insert. This insert contains the following warning: “…Oddly with today’s formats and the ever expanding possibilities of length, it seems that the attention span of the public is growing shorter. Since the beginning of recorded music the maximum length of the medium dictated popular taste and how music was written. Somehow all this changed. This album is an attempt to bring the two together again.”

So, how does it fare? Well, I’ll avoid the musicological aspects and implications of the quote above, and concentrate on the release itself. The sounds used across the eight hours and sixteen minutes of “Steaming” are very limited: essentially a collection of insect-like clicks and morphing synth sounds. There are also a lot of delay pedal feedback sounds, and running underneath most of the duration is a drone - sometimes cloudy and sluggish, sometimes a whistling, flickering, high-pitched texture. These sounds are left to run, with very little sense of composition or structure - indeed, the suspicion is that its some kind of “process music”. There are a few moments where other sounds (clearly related to the basic elements, but different enough that they stand out) appear briefly - some panning, vocalised sounds around the five and a half hour mark, some watery details with about an hour left, pronounced delaying/looping with twenty minutes to go - but essentially the whole piece consists of the same basic sounds being spun around. “Steaming” is generally very busy (in a minimal way), but there are moments where the piece is stripped to one layer; similarly, although essentially quiet, there are a few moments of slight saturation and distortion.
 
This is very hard to review, really. Condensed into a ten minute piece, “Steaming” could be a nice, tense, eerie work; but pressing “play” with the full knowledge of its length, changes its listening. The duration, combined with a complete lack of directional sense or structure, rather leaves it as a release to be “endured”. I think the problem  is that with the very limited palette of sounds, and precious little development of them, the suspicion has to be that loopool has made less effort to create a soundwork, than it has to create a duration. Something which is of very little interest to me. Its the audio equivalent of me padding out this review by typing: eejebjjeebejjeebbjjbeeeejbeb
jeebeeebejbjjebbjbbbejbjjeeejeeebeejee. Durational recordings can clearly have functional qualities, but on a “sound” level, there’s little for me here. And yes, I listened to every second.