Cat.#: ROHS!NYZCD-01
Release date: 4/12/2020
Format: CD, Digital
Noyzelab is David Burraston - or is it that David Burraston is Noyzelab? After experiencing the man's work, you may not be able to tell the difference. Noyzelab's debut at ROHS! is a surrounding and otherworldly album called CPMSubtree, made up of five surreal displays of studio electronics that elasticize the album's forty-minute runtime into unfathomable stretches of displacement.
Currently residing in Australia, Burraston has spent many years refining his focus in many different departments - lectures and residencies around the world, collaborations with Aphex Twin, Chris Watson, Oren Ambarchi and Russell Haswell, recordings published at Important Records, The Death Of Rave, Taiga, .MEDS, Cataclyst and Psoma Psi Phi, and installations assembled in dozens of indoor and outdoor spaces. He has built his own synthesizers and has written his PhD thesis on Generative Music & Cellular Automata, working to explore and document his research with generative systems, computing and all kinds of synthesis. On top of all of these things, he's often found with portable recording rigs, doing field recording to capture exotic and interesting atmospheres.
CPMSubtree is, at least in name, a follow-up to TTMSubtree, a cassette issued at Psoma Psi Phi in 2017, although the sounds presented here are wholly unique, in their own macroverse of existence. When listening to Burraston's music, you can never be quite sure what it is you're hearing or feeling - is that a sinewave, or feedback? Are those bells or a DX7? Is that a gust of Cootamundra wind on the mic, or algorithmically processed white noise? Are we frozen in space while otherworldly spectrums of color billow around us at light speed, or are we being poured down a waterfall, one molecule at a time, to coalesce into a pool of pulsing fluorescence? You might ask yourself any or all of these questions - but Noyzelab does not provide any answers. This is a one-way trip that you can't come back from, so proceed at your own discretion! For those of us eager to map the frontier of new and stimulating electronic music, the unknown has never been quite so rewarding.
NOTE: Noyzelab recordings utilize the full breadth of the frequency spectrum, and as such, are best experienced with either headphones or speaker systems that can yield very high and very low frequencies without issue. Lossless file formats are also encouraged, to minimize the reduction of these frequencies and their presence within the recordings.
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If you pay close attention to the global experimental underground, you should already be familiar with David Burraston AKA Noyzelab, a producer, synthesizer maker, sound designer and collaborator whose CV includes joint works with such luminaries as Aphex Twin and former Cabaret Voltaire member Chris Watson. Even so, the Australia-based experimentalist is hardly widely known, though this album on ROHS should help with that. Made up of five impossible-to-describe pieces, CPMSubtree sees Burraston combine creepy, otherworldly ambient sounds with unsettling modular melodies, droning electronics and the kind of foreboding synthesizer weirdness that was once the preserve of EMS Synthi-sporting academic experimentalists and the pioneering BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
(Review by Juno Records)
credits
released December 4, 2020
Music by: David Burraston
Artwork + line notes: AMB&D (Brian Grainger)
Record label: ROHS!
Publisher: ROHS! RECORDS
have yet to translate the song titles so the artist's intentions are somewhat of a mystery to me, but the wavering surface noise creates the theme of a dialogue between music & technology before becoming invisible to my ears. this conjures memories of listening to music as a child (long before the sterility of digital media), when i rarely took notice of the hiss & pops of records, 8-tracks, tapes, & am radio because they were a normal, necessary aspect of recorded sound. nice to be back again. Scott
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