Lull & Beta Cloud / Andrew Liles — Circadian Rhythm Reconfigured
Harris’ Lull project first saw the light of day in the early nineties when it was incorporated into the awkwardly named ‘isolationist’ category that brought together other beat-makers in need of respite from the tyrannical grids of their MIDI sequencers with post-industrial artists exploring darker textures in ambient music. While the tag didn’t last for long, a preoccupation with sound and how it can affect our perception of the world continues to drive ever-increasing amounts of artists to work with field recordings to create mediated realities. Beta Cloud has been doing just that since 2006, often adding dreamy, improvised guitar manoeuvres to coerce our attentions into going beneath the mundane, predictable surfaces of everyday life. And for Circadian Rhythm Disturbance, Pace and Harris aim was to present the psychological affects of insomnia through processed recordings with added atmospheric augmentations.
The result is a miasma of cars and voices streaking by, presumably through the open window of the compromised insomniac, as a hi-pitch needle injects an unpleasant tinnitus-like tone. Then, as if the listener has ingested sleeping pills, things start getting blurry as the needling is mercifully drowned out by the urban ambience increasingly soaked in reverb and delay as it coalesces with layers of slowly churning, deeply breathing subsonics. Both paranoid and somnolent, the cycling surges extend until three-quarters of the way through the piece when the hi-pitch tone violently returns to cut through the murk. Rudely roused, it makes the outside ambience take on a less soporific hue as the cars and voices become recognisable once more.
For this re-release, Cold Spring drafted in Nurse With Wound’s Andrew Liles to ‘reconfigure’ the experience as only he knows how. Belligerently ditching most of the original, Liles presents an array of clicks, whirrs, snips and squeeks in his proprietary high-definition fashion, sounding like the assembly of clockwork machinery that regularly and rudely interrupts the odd subterranean rumble. From here it builds into a battery of looped industrial hits, sometimes seeming like the CD has stuck, as they hammer and crash regularly and stubbornly like some kind of industrial gabba. But, despite growing to destructive levels the beating is never left alone for long, but faithfully curtailed by the mechanical ratchetting, like some kind of battle between time as it is tightly measured and how it is more loosely perceived. All this aggression is variously visited by snippets of music hall piano, lightly tinkling bells, stately Spanish guitar and lithely twisting glassy tones to form a bemusing but no less beguiling piece in stark contrast to its predecessor.
And it is this contrast that makes this release a particularly exciting, involving experience that travels from the disturbed drift of the original to the vicarious violence of Liles’ phantasmagorical time attack.