Melbourne’s Arek Gulbenkoglu has been honing an elusive but distinct approach for the past two decades, a trajectory that began with his earliest guitar-based material in the mid-aughts and telescoped with the release of cult classic The Reoccurrence in 2014. The past few years alone, however, have seen the sound artist’s most refined and purposeful work yet. Much of what I wrote about fissure, fissure, fissure applies to Swan in the Past, the third entry in Eamon Sprod’s inspired KINDLING series. Here again are the episodic vignettes of unassuming materiality, percussive punctures that have weight but no mass, blocks and smears of self-contained stasis. But KINDLING’s print element provides a new dimension for understanding Gulbenkoglu’s work, even if it introduces just as many questions as answers. The cover of the booklet (Sprod conspicuously calls it a “newspaper”) features the word “paradise” in green text, rendered in both English and various classical languages. The ten inner pages contain a series of images: individual curiosities in a seemingly random arrangement, a baffling clean-cut montage sequence somehow both more and less than the sum of its parts… sound familiar? It’s like a visual representation of what Gulbenkoglu is getting at with his music, an invitation to make connections between the unconnected, to draw conclusions from the inconclusive. It helps that the sonic aspect of Swan in the Past is more eclectic and unpredictable than ever. The first five-or-so minutes are radically minimal yet proceed with purpose, at least for a while. Digital obstacles—stalled process loops, computer concrète, clinical hum and whir—complicate things. Even when a piano creeps into the mix and hints at some shred of organic tonality, it soon reveals itself to be coldly synthesized. Later, unseen hands fumble with a tape deck before kicking off a lengthy drone that feels like a drill straight through the skull. The burbling coda is a relief, a cliffhanger, an epilogue: What was that? What now? Plan, not to scale, of the rooms in the social sciences building, Duke University?
Also check out The Greek Tape from earlier this year as well as the equally excellent first two KINDLING releases by Éric La Casa & Taku Unami and Seth Cooke.
Noise Not Music 