#eilean

“These Blackened Graces” enters with an instrumental loop and stately piano phrase, gradually joined by a traditional stringed instrument and chirping synthesis. A nearfield bass rasps and flutters like a beetle where your eyes cross. On “Phoill Bhig” (Google Translate equivocates, but perhaps “Small Pool?”) an oscillating woodwind drone is overlaid with static and manipulated samples. The woodwinds subside, replaced by murmuring tones and a white noise shore. The piece’s two components join in its final minute. “Bank na Cise” (“Kish Bank”) couples a muted, mono field recording and detuned synthetic waves. Inharmonic tones, like a far-off angry modem, join an otherwise melodious swirl.  

The album makes use of contrasts along several axes to achieve subtle shifts in tension and focus. “The Divide” offers halting wistful piano phrases and harmonized synthetic pulses that gradually give over to layers of inharmonic drones. On “Peninsulas,” a mono plucked instrument warbles as if played back on a bad tape deck, encompassed by a full stereo chamber orchestra. Tacking between rhythmic and arrhythmic, conventionally scaled and inharmonic, synthetic and recorded, low and high fidelity — often in the space of a couple minutes — Nyquist’s work evinces surprising narrative variation. Cuan is gentle and pastoral, but too fluctuating to constitute wallpaper.  

This album, as well as the larger catalog of French label Eilean Records are concerned with place, the latter associating each of its planned 100 releases with locations in an imaginary geography. Often implicit in the concept of “place” is a sense of radical incommensurability between places, that they emerge out of unreplicable confluences of biophysical processes and cultural practices in interaction over historical time. The variability and detail of these pieces is entirely in keeping with a philosophical emphasis on distinctness. We may never amble through the nooks of the Dublin Bay region, but Cuan gives us nine sonic environments of analogously immersive specificity. To the extent that recorded and digitally transmitted sound can do justice to place, Nyquist has made a fitting tribute.