Posset — A Diamond of Radiant Colour

Obscure experimental artist Posset released several CDrs in the last few years, including "A Diamond of Radiant Colour", what seems to be an unedited field recording of such terrible fidelity, it's really more of a lo-fi noise experiment.  This is as lo-fi as lo-fi gets, and not the cozy, crackling analog kind of lo-fi.  This sounds like a recording made with a 10 year old built-in laptop mic, or an equally old cellphone.  Most tracks here are in mono.  The mic has a very harsh resonant peak which results in an excess of grating treble.  There is no sound that could even be called 'low mid', let alone 'bass'.

In a way this is quite surreal - sounds are often so distorted that the nature of the source material is totally indecipherable.  The listener's imagination fills in the gaps, struggling to find meaning and context to the sound.  These are the most interesting moments of the record... but as one might surmise the album as a whole is a tedious listen, seeing as the same shrieking high frequences continue throughout the disk.  I can only tolerate it at very low volumes.

The longest track on the album is also my favorite, the haunting 14 minute 'Sannox and Lagg', in which one hears in the sparse sound space muffled ghosts of the real world... choral voices, quasi-melodic machine drones... one can't be quite sure what they are, and an ambient aura of mystery is successfully cultivated within the limited frequency spectrum.

Some of Posset's fascination with feedback and artifacts is certainly warranted... "Beaming" is a dirty amplifier tone with a wonderful set of harmonics, though it makes me wish some bass tones were included; they could fill this track out very nicely.

Other times, it sounds like Posset is content to simply scratch the microphone diaphragm with his fingernail, and I really have no use for tracks like "Ove Turns", which begins with some nice bells, but unfortunately they get so loud that they digitally clip.  Posset seems to think this is quite interesting in and of itself, and the song is 6 minutes long.  I can't stand it.  Also of note is "Showered In Enamel", which really sounds like a dentist drill, and is about as fun to listen to.

Surely, the creator of this album knows it is lo fi and likely made it so on purpose (one wouldn't need more than $10 to make an album that sounded clearer than this), but in my opinion the extreme low fidelity simply prevents a diversity of sonic texture beyond a certain point.  Posset has undeniably made an effort to investigate many different kinds of sounds on this album, and yet the result is still a tiring and only partially rewarding experience.