Phillip Golub – Loop 7

Greyfade

More magic from the increasingly-necessary Greyfade label. Greyfade do contemporary composition, which doesn’t tell you much, and this is labelled contemporary classical, microtonal, experimental, which are also labels that don’t tell you much. But that’s OK; that’s why I’m here, right?

The thing with Greyfade releases is that they seem to oscillate around a few ideas — small gestures (and I’d argue not minimalism), a clarity of sound, sparse but not abject tonal palettes. Typically the releases are fully composed — this doesn’t necessarily mean ‘written out on the stave’, but it does mean that the piece is liable to be the same next time you hear it performed. I’ve not seen the packaging for this release, but Greyfade also have very lovely sleeve design; they’ve also made books which exhaustively detail the composition process, which is a baller move if you ask me.

And for why? Well, one of the eternal frustrations I have with experimental music is that it’s not very social or inviting — minimal info on a sleeve, titles which are abstract references, that sort of thing. It doesn’t help people to discover stuff from a record, and surely one of the things with experimenting in most realms is that you make the results available to your community.

One of the amazing things about music production in 2025 is that there’s a million people online ready to tell you how to recreate something that someone else did — removing, or diminishing, the tech-fetish stuff. Quietism starts looking like conceit, so big up Greyfade for avoiding that.

So this piece from Phillip Golub is microtonal, which means that it’s got divisions of the octave greater than the 12 — think of a guitar with a load more frets, or a piano with a load more tiny keys. In this instance, it’s 22EDO, meaning ’22 equal divisions of the octave’. Why re-invent the wheel? Well, the wheel which is 12TET (12-tone equal temperament) produces specific intervals. And that’s fine.

But also there’s a whole world of tonality that exists beyond that. 22 EDO is, in some ways, fairly close to 12TET — if you divide an octave (which is two tones with a 1:2 ratio) by 12 you might as well divide it by 24 as well; in numbers terms, 22 isn’t too far off 24. Humans can only perceive pitch differences up to a certain threshold.

I appreciate you didn’t click this review to get talked to like I’m a shit maths teacher. My point — the material for this record is largely a few spare piano chords, descending. Perhaps a bit like Morton Feldman, or Erik Satie. And the trick is that they descend through those 22 divisions of the octave, going down at the end of each repetition. The clever bit, therefore, is that each time the intervals are different, but also close enough to be uncannily similar. Sometimes an interval sounds more sour, or more pure than it did before.

While it’s profoundly repetitious, insofar as the zoomed-out shape of the piece remains the same, the details of each repetition keep shifting. Over this there’s some desperately spare and distant additional instruments (vibes, electronics, guitar). Nothing so invasive as to be noticeable without squinting, but very present as a kind of haunting effect on the resonances of the repeating-not-repeating chords.

The press release includes some interesting stuff about the technical challenges of this — it’s largely realised through acoustic-electronic hybrid methods. It would be easier to have done it all in MIDI, but there’s a sense that the resonances and live feel of this would’ve been lost were it made electronics-only. I realise also that sounds like an old man being impressed by computers — which I am, in many ways — but I’m saying that it’s a careful and thoughtful production that leans into what the sounds need, rather than letting the concept carry the piece.

A great record and another hat-tip to the good people of Greyfade.

-Kev Nickells-