#another timber

The closest comparison, at least for the sections of this album containing tonal centers of any sort, is to Alvin Lucier’s post-Cageian universe of tones in pulsing conflict and resolution.  Upping the ante, Asis applies a Webernian concision to the sound, a kind of pointillistic repetition achieved by a simple guitar harmonic or the gentle strike of what sounds like a Tibetan singing bowl.  Instead of Lucier’s long-form drama, the sonic events are brief, clear and punchy.  Each tone is rife with overtone, sharply attacked or bowed into a state of resonant metallic frenzy.  Two objects touch, briefly but poignantly, allowing internal resonance and external vibration to play a role in the growing network of tone and color emanating from a single center.  Rarely does an easily identified layer of Lucierian pulse emerge; usually, beats are myriad and complex, rushing past each other to inhabit the same sonic space only to disappear.  

The piece titles reflect and dismiss these conflicts. Each supposedly juxtaposes action and inaction, two-word meditations on permanence, cognition or existence. What seem at first to be directives —“Do Nothing” and “Know Nothing” — might also embody states of being beyond agency. This is not music derived from Samuel Beckett’s action-driven notions of nothing struggling to become something or what is alive never quite being able to die. For Asis, no such conflict exists; listen to the second part of “Nothing Lasts” for her vision in distillation. Naming the sound is subordinated by its process of becoming, by the components of which that becoming is formed, but the becoming is itself a disappearance. The center does not hold, gradually dissipating as rhythms disperse, allowing the music to fragment and fade toward a silence any Wandelweiser composer would embrace. It is to her credit that Asis channels the well-worn trope with an individual voice.