
Tim Olive - Unmoved Mover [Hard Return - 2023]Canada-born, Tim Olive is an experimental musician, who currently resides in Kobe, Japan. His discography takes in over fifty releases dating back to the early 2000s with his latest, Unmoved Mover to be shortly unleashed. Evidently, this is a work of idiosyncratic texture-generating manipulation. The album consists of three pieces, emerging slowly and climaxing gently, within a process of compiling ideas and experimenting with them, in unorthodox and resonating loops. The three drone conceptions are in the vein of Earth’s “Earth 2: Special Low-Frequency Version” album or even, as a maximal counterpart of Sunn o))). Furthermore, the album is transgressing further into abrasive industrial, into Sonic Youth type of circular riffs, topped with splinters of no wave and positively, touched with a Throbbing Gristle brutal gentleness. Electrified sonic chunks that are drilling within each other, whirling metallic sounds, a current of energy and above all, a crush course into object-related creativity.
Unmoved Mover is an electroacoustic work per se and is sophisticated in terms of its ideas and execution. An extraordinary sonic adventure, commencing with a distorted guitar-like sound, but in reality, that “guitar” is much more than just a single instrument. When going deeper and deeper into listening, a synthetic materialization is clear. A highly detailed sound plumed with objects, electromagnets, magnetic pickups, scraped music boxes and more, with these all saturated with spring reverb, to create a very interesting output.
With Unmoved Mover, Olive has created a multi-disciplined experimental album, rhythmic in some parts, while fully abstract in others, an album powerful and hazy, raw and delicate, demanding and beautiful. It’s a release that involves a game of senses and imagination, making the whole experience marvellously interesting and uplifting!      Karl Grümpe
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