Room40 – 6th September 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
For an album that’s based solely on the sounds of the guitar, Dust Resonance sounds distinctly unlike a guitar album. As the title, Dust Resonance, suggests, this is a work of extended, drifting drones, a set that’s predominantly ambient in nature.
But as Norman Westberg’s recent solo releases – also released on ROOM40 – have demonstrated, it is quite possible to take the guitar into this territory, and to create expansive, subterranean drones with just six strings and some distortion pedals, and perhaps some reverb thrown in.
As Zimoun himself explains, he was interested in the guitar as a sound source for some time and have explored it on previous editions including Guitar Studies I-III. “On this work,” he says, “I’ve experimented with different methods and materials, specifically a Magnatone tube amplifier from the 1960s, and various speaker membranes covered with dust, soil, or small stones. The friction of these materials on the vibrating speaker membranes produced slight distortions and irregularities in the sounds, alongside the warm tube tones of the vintage amp.”
As such, the dust is rather more literal than metaphorical here, but the title and the substance of the sound presents a work that functions on multiple levels, with the connotations of dust settling as time elapses and the idea of dust and drones hazing together working alongside the physical interference of organic material with the mechanics of the recording process.
Zimoun’s approach, then, like Westberg’s, is similarly simple and sparse, but at the same time, adds an edge of experimentalism which is quite unique. The addition of materials to create friction and alter the texture of his guitar may take its cues from the ‘prepared piano’ pioneered by John Cage and taken forward as a career choice by Reinhold Friedl. I can’t think of so many examples of the guitar being twisted and mangled in such a way, or an artist taking such an organic, earthy approach to breaking down the fundamentals of the sound of their instrument of choice. It does, however, create the context for an album which features nine dronescapes which creep into one another to forge a continuous hum, scratching, scraping, quite literal earthworks. The thought of earthworks draws me to a place where I find myself reflecting on hut circles, tumuli, and the landscape of the iron age, something I was fascinated by in my early teens and have once again become drawn to having resumed, after a lengthy period, walking moorlands and studying the details of OS maps. And so it’s purple-hued heather-covered moors and outdoor expanses which occupy my mind as I listen to this, a work which evokes similarly vast and barren spaces.
The album contains nine numbered pieces, which hover low and heavy and segue into one another to create one single, monolithic work, and one of immense density. The colossal ‘DR Part 2’, which grinds on for almost nine minutes is exemplary.
I recently wrote on the experience of listening to the instrumental ambient release Ambient Short Stories by Bistro Boy, which slotted firmly into the ‘background’ ambient slot: soft, gentle, undemanding. This is most definitely not background: the dense, buzzing tones and uncomfortable frequencies of Dust Resonance place it firmly in the foreground. It’s impossible to settle back and let this drift over as you yawn and slowly relax into a space of tranquillity. Dust Resonance makes you squirm, sends tension down your spine. Throughout, there is a sense of unease, discomfort, of wrong, which rumbles in the guts.
Dust Resonance is a work which, beneath its smooth surface ambience, is grinding, rough-hewn, slow, and dragging, with billows of cloud accompanying the low-level churn. Something about this, paired with the slow-building spin, starts to feel a shade disorienting. You might sleep, but you may not sleep comfortably.
AA
Aural Aggravation 