#17x

I7x is only one of the several labels releasing Hilliar’s work under a host of names. There is something elemental, even archetypal, about the way Hilliar, here going by Ishq, chooses sounds, something that blends ancient and modern, even in the relatively recent realm of electronic music, where obsolescence occurs with stunning rapidity. Check out the sinewy, razor-sharp but somehow lush oscillating drone in the ninth section which, in turn, becomes a backdrop for some charmingly R2D2esque chatter around the stereo spectrum. The second part sports a few beautifully old-fashion airy synthesizer sweeps in the service of another crystalline drone but only after a slowly moving plane cinematically fills the soundstage. More sweeps and drone permeate the third section, but what sounds like a guitar loop of some sort provides harmonic complexity. There is nothing either ancient or “primitive” about the all-encompassing sonorities pervading the sixth section, and to label them as drone would be to sully their immaculate surfaces. Samples are manipulated in a way that foregrounds their changing characteristics but also the procedure itself. All of this places the music delightfully outside of time and even of its internal references, like the voice of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s Hal 9000 later on in the album.

The unifying factor in Ishq’s multivalent sound worlds is that sense of travel. He never employs drone as a separate entity; it ends up being a kind of soundtrack, whether to timbral shifts or to the reverberantly disembodied voices that float in and out of earshot. Nature sounds are given momentary prominence, like what I take to be an expertly recorded whale surfacing for air, but they vanish into a landscape alien to them. The musical elements are often graduated, existing on subtly morphing volume levels rather than following the huge Romantic arcs favored by other purveyors of controlled voltage and samples. It might be best to describe this album especially as a series of states in which the permeability of inhabitant sonic objects is put on display. The juxtaposition of natural and electronic sound is thoroughgoing all the way into the final section, where everything fragments in favor of largely acoustic instruments and voices in bursts of activity reminiscent of a shattered dream on the verge of ending. Here again, the ancient/modern dialectic is in play as stark and slowly simmering sine tones give way to the voices that usher out the music in slow fade. It is a fitting conclusion to a travelogue that engenders contemplation at every turn.