There’s no sound quite as entrancing as the plain human voice. I’ve zoned to drones and nodded out to noise, but somehow nothing quiets my cortex like words simply spoken. The center of SEF III is Alex Moskos’ calm, assured speech, and it entrances in a way that makes the sounds that slowly gather around him feel like a dream - like surreal events that probably should be happening, right? I mean they’re happening. They happen. I’m not dreaming them, I don’t think. I keep blinking and they keep being there.

This trio’s update on Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room” – it changes “I Am” to “I’m” and talks a lot more about clowns – is the most meditative example of SEF III’s hypnotic dream-state effect, but the whole thing is deliciously surreal in many different ways: one track is pure electroacoustic improv, another edits hip-hop songs into pointillist abstraction, another is musique concrète made from sounds of an alien coffee shop (I’m guessing there). What sticks it all to the back of my eyelids is the trio’s patience, which makes every sound seem simply like what had to be. In that sense, SEF III is a must.

– Marc Masters

<a href="http://ehserecords.bandcamp.com/album/sef-iii">SEF III by Eilbacher/Moskos/Moore</a>

ALEX MOSKOS on SEF III

I got really excited about the SEF III project when Duncan Moore showed me his text “I’m Sitting In A Room” and asked me to read it for our first Eilbacher/Moskos/Moore show. In his piece of writing the narrator sits in a room and describes the apparition of a series of clowns. There’s Den with a lion heart, the clown computer named Palisand (“a desktop may wear face paint and make mistakes too”) and Jermaine Calm, the Zen train wreck. Duncan’s reverie is like the software, your imagination the hardware and the text, the clowns as they are described in language, a VR experience. No auxiliary hardware needed like drugs or dare I say it, music. It’s a theme we keep coming back to in SEF III: the imagination as the original VR. We used the text for the first track on the record. Duncan plays tapes and Max plays electronics. As the text develops there is a slow disintegration of syntax and soon the words ring out only sonorously.  Some meaning remains but the experience continues in a clown-y abstraction. Max and Dunc’s electronics really come raining down as you perceive the shattered sentences and feel the clowns.