Screeding electronic noise, tapering contrails of feedback and devastating sonic ruptures collide with delicate, haunting, whispy drones. The passages twist, turn, transform, with new forms and sounds emerging as if from nowhere, looming out of darkness, growing, swelling, spreading. Bursts of static fizz in a virtual sonic vortex. These disruptions evoke dissonance, and affect a physical and psychic tension.
And this, in many respects, is the objective of ‘The Pier’ – fascinated by how audio systems, electronic and acoustic, are like human systems, The Cray Twins – that’s Paul Baran and Gordon Kennedy - have made it their mission to explore the border areas, which they define as ‘regions where things are no longer the same, where sound or the perception of it changes
or breaks down’. They define The Pier as ‘the limit of human extent, our furthest outreach into the depths, after which the space opens up to the unknown, the unheard’.
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It’s the blurring of the distinction between inner and outer, although it’s very much all about space. Just as Alexander Trocchi described himself as ‘a cosmonaut of inner space’ (a term subsequently used by William Burroughs), so The Cray Twins forge a work that extrapolates the parallels between inner and outer space in the form of soundscapes which propel the mind through the cosmos.
Sample ‘The Pier’
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