andy graydon at bay

Influenced by a quantity of factors, such as “musique concrete, minimalist and environmental art, cinema auteurs and the constellation of artists and musicians he works with today”, Andy Graydon is a name to keep an eye on - and an attentive one, too. Concerned with having the listeners “experience natural or found sounds in new ways”, the composer presents six soundscapes - mostly superlative - dealing with the diverse derivations of a well-definite aesthetic, that leaving those “found sounds” impose their weight on the psyche smoothly but definitively. “At bay” is, in that sense, both a record that does not actually strike as an awe-inspiring discovery, as it tends to a poetry of the unspeakable more than an in-your-face explicitness of meaning - this if we really want to find a connotation in there. What Graydon seems to be looking for is the traceability of an internal logic in something that, at a first glance, could emerge as a study on a particular kind of aural stimulus or the different viewpoint on materials that other explorers might have examined according to dissimilar perspectives. Field recordings, static electronic waves or almost indistinct, bottomless activities all belong to a single vital organism whose sonic rendition is decidedly anti-intellectual, wholly in touch with a material necessity of perceiving the emission as an ordinary phenomenon, not the result of a microscopic test. Accordingly, this is also a just right example of forward-minded ambient music. In any case, the results are worthy of being not only mentioned, but conscientiously measured.

reviewed by Massimo Ricci in touching extremes
08-03-2008