Werner Dafeldecker + Eliad Wagner — Fray Field

Berlin-based composer Eliad Wagner, whose work with Serge modular synthesisers I have previously heard as part of the Modulisme series, is here collaborating with Werner Dafeldecker, Austrian bassist and composer, for a thirty-seven-minute album called Fray Field. It is an evocative deep listening electroacoustic work, a modern musique concrete, with an esoteric and otherworldly post-industrial feeling, and sound textures you can taste.

Detuned resonant drones, field recordings, found percussion and all manner of unidentifiable crinkling, rustling, wooden and metallic taps and scratches, are imbued with subtle saturation, the electric sinew of amplification. Harmonic spectra are deconstructed and reconstructed with resonators, uncovering pleasantly deep bass tones by amplifying choice harmonics to the point of feedback. Some of it originates from the modular synthesizer, while other sounds are processed by it.

The compositions are a dreamlike succession of moments, with an intentional minimalism. There are only a couple of simultaneous sounds at a time, but none overstay their welcome. As a modular synth enthusiast myself, and a fan of the complex modulated tones of artists like Stockhausen and Parmegiani, this album is perfectly to my taste. Modular synths are naturally suited towards sketching this kind of intuitive abstract topography, with their seemingly endless timbral subleties.

Fray Field is one of the most accessible purely experimental recordings you could find, because it is always vivid and engaging. It is structured, but not conventionally so, as it has no meter. It is timbrally rich, but not tonal. It is a masterful exercise in sound for its own sake, for the discerning textural synthesist, as well as a trip to a parallel alien dimension.