It is not up for debate that Bryan Day is very good at what he does—nor that he is the only one who even can. Not only does he scratch-build novel sound sculptures that function as both musical and visual artwork, but many of them are also fully usable instruments as well, harnessed by the same hands that cobbled them together in amazing displays of improvisational dexterity (check out this video of him playing with Jay Kreimer as Seeded Plain a few years ago). That dexterity also allows for transposition to a variety of contexts, something explored on other collaborative efforts on eh?, Eyesore, and elsewhere over the years, a recent gem being 2021’s Crooked Doppler with Seymour Glass on Tanzprocesz. Like that tape, Woven Territories dissolves any boundaries between performance, observation, and processing, making it difficult—irrelevant—to tell who’s doing what. Is this a field recording of the same space in which these machines are trundling, or is it cut-and-paste? Is that the sound of a contact mic’d vibrating surface or the growl of an old tractor engine? Any answers I spitball tend toward the imagistic because of how vivid these surreal vignettes are, painstakingly painted in all the right colors. I am a big fan of the unwieldy motifs that show up in the lengthy sketches like accidental inkblots: short synth ditties like train station announcement tones; sweeping, gauzy swirls of loosely spooled tape blur.
Noise Not Music 