#the rush

So it goes. Even when a more crystalline timbre would seem to be on tap — the first sound in “Rushed” takes a page from Robert Fripp’s Soundscapes book — it soon distorts, begins to wobble and finally exhibits a mutating subtext of pitch complexes, growls, sibilance and snap that overtake any semblance of modality. When the piano on “Dropped” threatens to inhabit center-stage, to clarify its textures too completely, it’s already masked high frequencies succumb to the grime of something sounding like overlayed ululation or demon-speak. Listen at 10:42 for the latter in stark relief. The piano can hit so hard that tone threatens to split, and in fact, by pieces end, those chafed pitches are all that’s left.

My descriptions make it all sound ugly, and nothing could be further from the truth. Like Vanessa Rossetto’s painstakingly constructed homey landscapes in apotheosis mode, the sonic unpredictabilities subvert and reenforce the terms on which each piece exists. The technology itself is not simply a part of the process but just as often guides it along an increasingly labyrinthine path. Sounds stretch beyond themselves while also somehow, and miraculously, remaining contained, not simply in a repetitive way but as objects encased in their own self-perpetuating skins. Each piece sounds like a haiku stretched beyond breaking point, a small-scale meditation with mountains in view. The fact that this sound-poetry can be stark and lush simultaneously, as the compositional processes break their boundaries to become the compositions, gives the music its power and delicacy, setting it apart in a more than crowded field.