John Sellekaers‘s latest series of drone sculptures are the sort of journey in which you can just close your eyes and allow them to transport you.
The drones are deep and resonant, but with other lighter textures skirting the edges, pushing you off balance just a little. The ebb and flow is at times slow and rhythmic with pulses scattered, the rising and falling bringing to mind oceanic movement under polar ice caps; impenetrable but real. We know it is there, but it is beyond our experience.
There is also an air of the inhospitable about some parts, at least inhospitable for humans. We can hear the screech of birds and the whistle of arctic wind, and can almost feel the incessant cold resting on our skin. Desolate silence, inhuman landscapes, a hypnotic throbbing and the sense of human danger which is palpable. Low washes of waves shining in the sun, a relentlessness and the feeling of not really knowing where to turn. Some of the textures jar against others, the sound palette being full and at times far from relaxing. In other places, we can sense the scattered light from distant stars, information travelling for millions of years, bursting through the stratosphere and passing by us in the blink of an eye; while at other points, time seems to come to a standstill. There is a weightlessness, a sense of dropping through time, but not actually moving. You are in limbo, with a sound in your ears and here the light is stationary as you fall with it.The strange juxtaposition of the slowest of motion and a full-pelt descent somehow brings about a sense of stasis. The sounds move around you and through you; and by the time the album comes to an end and silence reigns again, you start to notice sounds differently. Footsteps outside or the drone of cars could easily be coming from the stereo.
It is odd, but after forty-five minutes your ears have been rebooted somehow.
-Mr Olivetti-
