“Are All Things Equivalent?” may be the question, but the answers that Matt Waldron offers up for his contribution to Drone Records‘ sequence of 10” vinyl releases are as difficult to pin down as one might imagine from someone who has been a significant contributor to the surrealistic behemoth that Nurse With Wound has become over the last forty-odd (some of them very much so) years.
irr.app.(ext.) has been Waldron’s own particular entry point into the interface between the subconscious and audio manipulation for many years before and while he accompanied NWW on portions of their long strange delve into the nether regions of sound. Here, his own particular response to the pondering of the unknown that the series invites bears obvious relation to said ensemble, but is identifiably very much Waldron’s doing.
Voices skip out of a morass of whirling, wandering sounds and tones, with cut-up nearness and far-distant drones circling and intertwining, folding and unwinding in a panoply of disorientation. Atmospheric notation brushes insinuatingly up against eldritch textures. “At Some Scale, All Things Are Equivalent” he suggests, whipping up a haunted miasma of unheimlich overtones and visceral underdrones, evoking a body whose organs have got up and left of their own accord. The unconscious is referenced on “Sleep Turbines”, and it is perhaps this side of the clear vinyl EP that fits the macro-microscopic illustration on the sleeve as much as the more obvious reference to scale on the obverse. Clanking machinery grinds on dolefully, not so much in the industrial process of beat and battery, but rather as the fluttery kinesis of escaping gasses and mysterious alchemical processes of manufacturing and processing. This is the nuanced sound of the brain’s gears winding down in the depths of a dream as much as the fevered imaginings of a hallucinogenic meta-waking state of mind, as rendered through the medium of drone and klang, hustle and bustle, of disturbing ripple and overly-intimate slither.-Linus Tossio-
