Here we have a CD from Fourth Dimension Records, a great UK label now relocated to Poland, presented in a digipak and decorated with abstract photographs of organic matter - reflecting the sonic themes found on the album. 常若/Tokokawa has three tracks, all very much cut from the same cloth, and is described in the label blurb as: ‘Powered by modular synthesis [and] “concrete” assemblage technique’. In that regard it’s completely unclear who is doing what in the duo, but this doesn’t lessen the album’s impact.

The first piece, ‘天の川/Ama-no-gawa’, is just short of seven minutes in length, and begins with a fast barrage of microsounds and larger tones which swoop around the stereo field; joined soon enough by reverbed jolts, choral voices, and backwards voices, all heavily processed. It’s ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ electroacoustic, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. Halfway through this thick onslaught, the track does offer a little breathing space, though it’s soon pummelled into the ground with distorted pulses and high speed percussion processing. The whole track is very crammed, very layered - often with contrasting elements - and doesn’t really invest into many dynamic shifts. There are a few sounds that are a bit ‘digital’ for my ears, but overall it’s a compelling start to the album which raises some questions and expectations.

I’m pleased to announce that these questions and expectations are never resolved - to my ears, anyway. The remaining two pieces take ‘天の川 / Ama-no-gawa’ as a starting point and just run with it - without ever straying too far from the destination point. So, ‘塗り壁/Nurikabe’, a twelve minute work, is more of the same, but with a greater sense of dynamics and space. It begins with an eerie assortment of small sounds over a low drone but soon enough explodes, with reverberating thuds, juddering percussive hits, and shimmering treble tones, This passage is very effective, riding constant movement and shifts in timbre. Deconstructed music box sounds appear, alongside darker string-sounding tones, and there are also excellent electronic scraping sounds, and processed electronics flying around in shards. More interestingly, there is also a brief moment of silence, followed by a quieter (slightly) section, creating a better sense of structure and space in the track. In the second half there is some nice percussion mangling that Apex Twin would be proud of, but again there are moments where acoustic sounds creep though, and these offer a contrast in colour and space. Whilst the track is not exactly aggressive, it has an explosive aspect, and it’s certainly dark and full of dread in passages.

The final work, ‘蒸発する幽霊/Jouhatsu Suru Yuurei’, is nearly 27 minutes in length, and doesn’t really expand too much on the duo’s efforts thus far. However, this greater length does accommodate several sections where the duo settle on sounds and approaches for longer spells, allowing them to properly stretch and investigate sounds. The first passage is a good example of this, as small percussion sounds, some processed, some acoustic, play against trebly sounds stretched to breaking point, and spacey background drones. There are layered beds of delayed percussion which are perhaps a bit basic at points, but they are interrupted by imaginatively processed electronics, the best of which sounds like a stuttering fan. About a third of the way through, backwards sounds predominate, building up a thorny wall of echoes, and again it feels a little basic - but again these are punctuated by acoustic sounds and processed debris. Some of these are distorted and it should be said that the distorted sounds throughout the album are really very beautiful, showing great attention to EQ and frequency. The track features a fair amount of thumb piano (or something similar), sometimes discernible, sometimes processed into metallic clangs, and often with long trails of delay; this gives a weird sense of exotica to the piece, though this is not a theme pursued in the album. The section featuring thumb piano sounds is another long passage where the duo settle and explore, coupling backwards sounds, busy delays, drones, white noise bursts, and reverberating electronic scrapes and snarls. Near the end, the electronic clouds lift a little, and more acoustic percussive sounds can be heard, delaying in layers at fast speeds.

This is all solid stuff. Whilst the first two pieces perhaps suffer from an overall lack of dynamics and space, the third work, which does offer more space, suffers from lengthy sections where sounds are simply echoing and layering without really coalescing into something greater. The album in general is hardboiled - and all the better for it - and in that regard the first two tracks do present effectively tangled monoliths of sound. There is arguably little sense of thematic development within or across the pieces, but again that adds to the density and monolithic feel - though in that regard I am curious as to how the tracks were created: they have a kineticism you might associate with live pieces. Formally it’s not too far from harsh noise, with thick tangled layers of sounds and lots of movement, the album has that excessive mass that you often find in harsh noise - or indeed HNW. So it’s actually a good entry into electroacoustic music for noise folks: a dense, detailed, hardboiled album of electroacoustics.