Olive met up with fellow Canadian ex-pat Cal Lyall in Tokyo in 2012 where Lyall has been active as a musician and organizer of the long-running Test Tone music series. The two did a few performances together and spent time in Lyall’s studio. Since then, their busy schedules have prevented the two from playing together. But in the intervening time they’ve been trading the resulting recordings back and forth, cooperatively weaving together the mix which they finalized over the last half of 2018. Olive is credited with his usual “magnetic pickups and electronics,” while Lyall utilized “hydrophones and electronics.” Olive explains, “Cal used a series of small vessels filled with water, maybe a liter or two and a few hydrophones immersed in the water. He agitated/moved the water in various ways and manipulated the vessels themselves. The audio signal was processed in real time, direct to the recorder. His cat got involved at one point, but I don’t think we ended up using that piece.”

 From the onset, the 27-minute Lowering bursts forth with low-end agitated shudders and quick-fire spatters and scrapes and takes off from there. The two build densities and shifting layers plying bass-heavy rumbles, abraded tumults and shards of feedback in to a surging whole. Concentrated murmurs of crunching timbres provide a foundation of tectonic shifts against which the Olive and Lyall place gestural tracers of scuffs, creaks, percussive attacks, resonant reverberations and cavernous pings. (Its intriguing to note that Alan Jones who did the mastering of the disc is a career undersea acoustician as well as a musician.) Pacing is also central to the piece, stretching out the velocity of activity to a seething crawl and then intensifying it back up to vigorous agitation. The two are careful listeners and while the arc of the piece is a whorl of motion, a sense of transparency is always preserved, allowing the multitude of sonic strata to surface and then submerge back into the mutable mix.  

Brother of Divinity by Tim Olive & Yan Jun

Brother of Divinity, Olive’s duo with Chinese sound artist Yan Jun is more spare and open than Lowering. Here, one gets the sense of sonic calligraphy built from sparks, static, shadows of melodic fragments and burred and squiggled oscillations. Yan’s electronics meld effortlessly with Olive’s setup and Olive reminisces that “We recorded for two afternoons and got quite a bit of music... While going through the recordings, it occurred to me that two of the pieces might work well together. They were similar in length, so I basically laid them on top of each other, did some very minimal mixing and that was it. The textures are very clear, very open, so they work well together, and I love the inadvertent/unplanned consonances and dissonances and the matching and mismatching of textures.”  

Listening as the 28-minute piece unfolds, a certain playfulness emerges. One can hear the two probing at the activity of sound creation, something that is certainly central to Yan’s work. But rather than a conceptual exercise in aural cataloging, the two revel at the accrual and juxtaposition of resultant sounds. Radio grabs, quicksilver scratches and scrapes, sputters and pops, flutters and quavering tone sweeps, reworked plucked and fractured melodies, hums and hiss duck in and out with nimble fluency. The variety of timbres, densities and pitch spectrum is striking right up until the final moments of low thrumming pulse, electromagnetic fuzz and the distant chime of church bells. But it is the process of weaving these together into a coruscating aggregate that ultimately stands out. Even without knowing the final mixing process, the overlapped layers which accumulate and then fray apart with variegated intensity and concentration reveal a volatile unfolding structure.