asher l ubeboet cell memory

The memories harbored herein play a sort of aural hide-and-seek. Austere sound textures and noise detritus are glimpsed through crevices that close like eyelids and occasionally open onto vast, largely motionless sonic shores.

Track titles such as “alter” (the other) and nullus (neither) stand as concrete reasons supporting the intuition that these works serve as meditations on the foreign and exceptional quality secreted by experience. A world that speaks in order to say nothing is indeed a mysterious phenomenon, and it seems precisely this sort of process that has ensnared the duo’s attention. They gather field recordings like pebbles on the beach and pour them out over these two lengthy works. The voices of everyday incidents and events thus play tirelessly, but retreat as they invite one closer, and guard their secret while bearing all.

“Alter” is a dense accumulation of static rather than a clean drone. Molecules of sound are investigated in their very fiber. A versatile touch and considerable endurance is demonstrated in the turning over and assessment of each sussurating speck. One’s grasp of the piece grows no firmer as this process advances, however. In fact, the contrary proves the case, as the piece becomes only more abstract, distant, and intangible. Before long, its shadow has usurped its frame, a chilly, uninviting mixture of suffocated electronic buzzes and sombre cavernous chimes.

“Nullus” sustains this mood and momentum while also occasionally testing the surface tension with a crunching metallic jaggedness. While its concerns are admittedly few, Cell memory thereby manages to guard its secret very well. Its perplexing though skilled arrangement is enticing for its challenging nature - an ideal rock on which to cut one’s teeth.

reviewed by max schaefer may 6, 2008 in cyclic defrost