Dirk Serries – Microphonics XXVI-XXX : Resolution Heart

 

Tonefloat

The final instalment in Dirk Serries‘ long-running series of releases, Resolution Heart sets a fittingly uplifting mood for the end of a process that started with the first Microphonics CD in 2008. Presented on heavyweight vinyl (with a limited boxed art edition available too), the LP bids farewell to Serries’ eight-year exploration of the dynamics of tone, texture and timbre, the music delivered with a distinctly different atmosphere than when in his alternate drone guise of Fear Falls Burning.

Possessed of a mellifluous grandeur floating in on rolling organ(ic) drones, the album’s track titles alone are enough to communicate his intent, such as “Epiphany and Isolation” and “I Communicate Silence”. The latter hints at Serries’ subtly-applied technique of opening with up to a minute’s worth of barely-audible rising harmonics on each piece. This gradual sweep soon fills the air with the sound of cascading slow reverberations and plangent microsurges that weave a magical spell constructed of nothing more (nor less) than sound waves and sense impressions, and the effect can be overwhelming, almost beatific.

Likewise, the silence that he communicates returns to bring forth a swirling swarm of effects-riding half-melodies that fill spaces somewhere between those occupied by the likes of, say, Main and Michael Rother, shimmering and salient among gentle ambient structures, content to take the long, slowly transforming road down into the valleys where quietude returns among the softly warming crackle of the vinyl run-out groove on side one.

If there’s an overarching theme to Resolution Heart then “Swept to The Skye” builds strongly upon it, a hearty bass presence swelling under the treble layer until it nigh-on rattles the windows and shakes the firmament itself in its steadfast determination to evoke feelings of both breathless incipient dread and the approach of some kind of sublime, angelic rapture. The cleanliness with which Serries achieves his sound comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with his alternate identity as vidnaObmana, and here he takes the restrictions of time and space as blessings to be worked within, giving the whole a singular identity.

Often understated and happy to let nothingness and absence be active choices, Resolution Heart saves the final melancholy for Microphonics part XXX, “The Deprivation Of Heart”. This is a piece which breathes with the listener, unfolds its sorrows at parting and lifts up into one last pounding-hearted trembling of the beams, the delayed departure shuffling off in dustmotes and drones that conclude the series with no bangs, no whimpers, but one perfectly drawn-out fade.

-Richard Fontenoy-