I absolutely love this type of thing. I’ve had a real appetite for everything electroacoustic ever since hearing Karlheinz Stockhausen at a formative age, and diving straight in to Agitations, the first track is a satisfying monster.
“Abscission One” is an immersive aperture your mind falls right into, a mirage ride of mutating drone whose chaffing frictions visually burn, elliptically bend in a figure of eight that dials you elsewhere. An opener that doesn’t disappoint, has me cranking up the volume to bathe in its gorgeous bloom as fond memories of Mount Vernon Astral Temple’s communion with the corrosive flood through. A resonating ransom that the cusping crater of “Woktones One” expands as the sound’s source disembarks from its domestic origins to surf a crystalline glimpse of the infinite.
This is a sound born from the specially prepared wok that honours the inner cover, one of numerous pics of cobbled togetherness that give an all important context to the sounds you are hearing into a visual reference that documents Oscillatorial Binnage’s salvaged approach to their craft. The booklet depicts the errant DIY-cum-scientific disaster area that the group regularly look up from as you fold out the CD’s digipak, something that occupies your eyes as your ears marvel at the way they transform all this junk, tease out its volatile vocabulary. There’s an amplified cross-pollination that haunts the outgrowing Jaws-like stutter of “Lamppostian Fronds” in an orchestrated dive of weird colourations and mirror-written blurs that kinetically kite to crescendo, then dramatically drop to a mutineering taper. The plaintive vibrations of “Lamp Post One” are full of chimera(ing) feedback and psychoactive collision, elusive shapes that funnel-web the frequencies and tourniquet the recoil, hop your neurons like agitated magpies.Tonally it sparkles, dynamically embers strange overtones and saturated warmth, and most importantly never bores. Even when its monotony-caught, the repetitives are hypnotic, reel you in with raspy promise, gorge you in a blistered otherness whose serrated shivers end Agitations so eloquently and earmark this release (for me at least) as one of 2020’s worthy standouts.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
