#unfathomless

We’re told that Ristic and Murmer worked from 2020-2022 on this palimpsestic immersion, recording using sound sources from Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Estonia. Like the album’s title though, those locations are only means to a sonically inclusive end. Murmer describes the difficulties of capturing a scaffold “singing,” a wonderfully anthropomorphic descriptor that might just as easily be applied to every sound and space opened up as the music eases onward. Michael Pisaro’s groundbreaking Transparent City series laid the groundwork for this “musical” transfiguration of place, or environment, and we hear that process as room tones are augmented in “zamišljena sjena vjetra”’s opening moments. Tone, point and timbre converge in increasing and amalgamating contrapuntal layers, each sound containing and negating its environment, scaffolding to construct a new one. The mechanical sounds and attendant squeaks beginning at 7:54 transform themselves into birdsong in listener perception, just as isolated rain drops lend their pitches to delicately aperiodic rhythmic occurrences beginning at 2:01 of the second piece, “kaugpääs; antenn.” Those sounds and their outcomes unify the pieces, individually and as a pair, various shades of rushing water ultimately taking on the characteristics of a busy speech-scape or the morphing drone perfectly complemented by the singing scaffold as it supports the first piece’s second half.

Magical moments abound. What is that gorgeous shift of focus, that transparent but iridescently pitched liquid, foregrounded with glassy certainty at 13:14 of the first piece, dead-center of the soundstage and highlighting the sonic clusters surrounding it? Can there be anything more ravishingly reverberant than those multi-frequency interjections 2:07 into the second piece? In their echoing repetition, they prefigure the best of all, the Requiem chant coalescing symbiotically with all that has preceded it but sitting comfortably behind it, worlds within worlds in transcendent correspondence, a support system as uneasy but as natural as the rush of voices and motorized life that brings the album from church to town in a life-affirming conclusion. These days, there’s little chance of a bad recording. What’s done with the recordings is the crux of each situation, and The Scaffold is a winner at all levels.

According to the album’s liner notes, which you can read on its Bandcamp page, the impetus for this collaboration was a conversation the two men had about making music in a time of environmental and social crisis. Collected sounds — birdsong, bugs, rain, running water, the conversations of passing people, machinery — figure prominently in the two-part, 43-minute-long piece, which is bisected so evenly (the running times are exactly 22:00 and 21:00) that one suspects that this CD might once have been planned to be an LP. But so do played sounds, particularly pulsing and tolling synthesizer voices. Both have been subjected to interventions, having been looped, chopped and filtered so that their combinations constitute a sound environment quite distinct from the ones that were sampled to make it. The played sounds don’t mix with the environmental ones so much as they bob on top or alongside them, which might represent the relationship between humans and the world they strive to manipulate and manage. But if this is a soundtrack to our currently combusting world, it imposes a very specific combination of moods, simultaneously forlorn and persistent.

The experience of this recording may be modified by skipping the accompanying notes. Separated from their description of intent, this music’s crepuscular vibe might dominate, and hip sleep specialists could plausibly prescribe it as a possible aid for those seeking slumber. This is not, however, a failure on the part of the work to communicate, but evidence that the collaborative impulses that brought it into existence include the listener.