Phil Niblock — Touch Three

Touch three offers up three disk's of vast panoramic canvas of sound, each track seems to invite you into a different world,time or place. You’ll find your self lost within the depths of the drone and that’s all that seem to exist. It’s almost like a religious experience, deeply meditative, but at the same time wide awake.

Disk one opens with the track Sethwork, which utilises the sound of acoustic unamplfied guitar played by Seth Josel, for it’s drone. It has a superb feeling of anticipation to it, in my mind I picture a vast desert, as dawn is cracking, it’s night time chill. Around you huge rock out crops rise from the sand, giving a little shade, but as the sun heat gets stronger, the shadows are lessened. Vultures cut the cloudless sky, and all you can see ahead of your self is heat haze, which seems to altered the horizon, into strange hovering shapes. Every now and then out of the drone the sound of string sawing hovers into your audio view, then it becomes swallowed into the drone once more. Also on disk one is Lucid Sea, which uses recorders as the drone element, it gives the track a hypnotic folksy quality to the drone. It murmurs of swaying trees, warm glow of the sunlight on though the forest leafy  roof, sweet smell of unknown flowers. Maybe one can almost picture a group of travellers resting for the night around a campfire,deep in the forest, there eyes trying to say open just a little longer to watch the fires dancing shapes.
Sax mix from disk three is a deeper and denser in it's drone Patten. It use's Alto, tenor and baritone saxophone played by Ulrich Krieger, to create the drones. Here things seem very ominous, the quality of the drone seems like you've been sucked down a long flesh lined tunnel, it seems to get deeper, the further you move into the track. Theres also  a captivate feeling of sinister anticipation, pressing down on you all the time. Every now and then new pitches of drones, fold out and swim into the wall of sound, as the track seems to develop, it becomes some how brighter, like some one switching on a florescent tube above you, all the details of the tunnel seem to have become Clear and brighter, still in the back it hovers in feelings of dread.

A enchanting and ever rewarding collection of drone works by one of the old masters of minimalism. A steal at £12.00 for 3 disks set, you can buy it direct from touch  here.