Counting Pulsations announces its method in the title. The music repeatedly takes a pulse, counts it long enough for the listener to recognize a pattern, then alters the spacing, weight, frequency or surrounding atmosphere until counting stops being useful. Rhythm gradually becomes texture. Texture starts behaving like rhythm. Across a little more than an hour, Basses-Terres keeps moving back and forth across that boundary.
The physical cassette almost illustrates the idea before it is heard. The shell is transparent and filled with tiny gold glitter particles. Hundreds of separate points are suspended throughout the plastic, each one meaningless by itself but collectively forming a field. Behind them sits the black tape wound into a large dark circle. The pale yellow typewritten label is almost aggressively plain: BASSES-TERRES 2017 / Counting Pulsations. Mechanical repetition inside decorative excess.
The exterior artwork is harder to identify and better for being so. Black-and-white photographs crop a human figure so tightly that the body becomes secondary to a dense shaggy or fur-like surface. Folds, strands, dark masses and partial pieces of skin interrupt one another. The image is readable as a person but refuses to provide a conventional portrait. The figure has been converted into texture.
That visual treatment has a direct parallel in the audio. Recognizable musical events repeatedly become surfaces.
“opening triangulated” begins with one of the strangest structures on the cassette. The opening is extraordinarily quiet compared with what eventually develops, with isolated vertical attacks appearing against a thin background. Above them, a repeating electronic sweep travels gradually upward and downward through the frequency range in enormous arcs. The shape returns again and again, but never feels like a conventional melody. It behaves more like scanning equipment, a rotating signal or some electronic organism taking a very long breath.
The sweep is important because it establishes two simultaneous kinds of time. Beneath it are much faster pulses, individual events that can almost be counted. Above them is a huge slow cycle taking close to a minute or more to complete. The listener therefore hears microscopic repetition inside macroscopic repetition. Counting one layer means losing track of another.
As “opening triangulated” develops, the initially thin recording becomes substantially heavier. The center of the track fills with low-frequency material while the sweeping upper signal continues passing overhead. Toward the final portion the sound begins thinning again. The whole seven-minute piece behaves like something gradually entering range, becoming fully visible, then moving away.
“The mask of a person who no longer listens” removes most of that brightness. The median energy collapses downward into the low frequencies, making it one of the darkest tracks on Side A. A deep continuous foundation remains while isolated higher events appear above it like brief openings in a ceiling. Around the middle, these interruptions become more frequent and much brighter. The low body remains almost stubbornly in place while other information tries to break through it.
The title makes an interesting companion to the sound because the track seems to preserve hearing while withholding response. Signals arrive. Some are strong enough to briefly illuminate the entire recording. The underlying mass simply continues.
“trypophobia / legs wide open” changes the scale again. It begins with a relatively exposed high-frequency field before a much denser low-middle body enters. The track then divides itself into large blocks. Dense sections alternate with thinner passages, but the transitions are not smooth fades. They feel more like gates opening and closing.
There is a particularly strong physical quality to the repetition here. The pulse does not function as a traditional drum beat. It repeatedly presses the recording forward. Broad noise, low tones and vertical attacks accumulate until the entire spectrum seems occupied, then portions disappear and the structure can be counted again.
That title, “trypophobia,” almost accidentally describes the visual logic of the glitter shell. Hundreds of tiny points cover the cassette while the music repeatedly creates fields of small repeated events. The eye counts specks. The ear counts pulses. Eventually both give up and perceive a surface.
“formed, unformed, re-formed” may be the clearest structural statement on Side A. Its first minute is comparatively sparse, built from low material and separated electronic events. Then the pulse rate increases dramatically. Repeated vertical attacks begin arriving several times per second. The track grows denser until individual impacts are difficult to isolate.
Around the middle, the structure suddenly clears.
Then it begins again.
The title is almost literal sonic instruction: material establishes a form, breaks that form apart, then builds another from the same basic ingredients. Nothing needs to disappear completely. The relationship between the ingredients changes and the listener perceives a new object.
“lines of dismemberment II” is where Counting Pulsations becomes nearly mechanical. It is one of the most dynamically consistent pieces on the entire cassette. For more than four minutes, a dense grid of recurring attacks occupies almost the full frequency range. The pulses are so persistent that the ear stops interpreting them individually and begins hearing a continuous vibrating body.
Something especially interesting happens gradually across the track: the spectral center keeps climbing. The recording becomes progressively brighter even though its overall level remains remarkably stable. It is almost as though the same machine is running continuously while somebody slowly changes the material being fed through it.
Then, during the final half-minute, the grid breaks.
The dense vertical repetition gives way to clearer sustained bands and a more obviously tonal shape. After several minutes of nearly uninterrupted impact, the appearance of sustained sound feels enormous. The pulse has finally been dismembered.
“undecipherable eyes, protected from the sunlight” closes Side A by withdrawing almost everything that “lines of dismemberment II” accumulated. This is one of the sparsest tracks in terms of attacks, built around a deep dark foundation with isolated high events striking far above it. More importantly, it suddenly opens the stereo field far wider than almost anything before it.
Most of Side A is extremely centered, sometimes nearly mono. Here the sides separate dramatically. Sound begins existing around the listener rather than only in front. That widening makes the title feel oddly appropriate without requiring a literal reading. Something previously protected or enclosed has been opened spatially.
The track begins quietly, grows into a long dark central plateau, then spends its final section retreating almost to nothing.
Side A lasts roughly thirty-two minutes. Side B is slightly shorter at around twenty-eight and a half, but it does not feel like a reduced second half. It begins by accelerating the entire language.
“one way / voice link” has one of the highest densities of discrete attacks on the cassette. Repeating blocks appear, disappear and return in changing forms. The spectrum repeatedly expands upward, contracts, then expands again. The whole piece gradually increases in level through its first four minutes before rapidly falling away near the end.
The track also has substantially more stereo width than most of the earlier material. The result is restless. Pulses do not simply repeat in time; they seem to occupy changing positions and depths.
“Kiss in the neck / reversed reflex” is almost the opposite spatially. It is essentially mono, locked tightly into the center, and it contains the fastest continuous event density on the cassette. The attacks arrive so rapidly that pulse and buzz begin becoming interchangeable.
The first three minutes maintain remarkable pressure. Behind the rapid surface are slowly moving tonal curves, shapes rising through the spectrum underneath the constant repetition. The listener receives fast and slow motion simultaneously again, but in a much more compressed form than on “opening triangulated.”
Then, during the last minute, the structure partially disassembles. The upper field drops away, the repetition thins and isolated elements become easier to distinguish. A reflex repeated enough times has become involuntary; reversing it means recovering the individual motion.
“fissure methedrin” is the longest track on the cassette at about seven and a half minutes and spends much of that time deep in the lower frequencies. Its first two minutes are almost subterranean. A low continuous body remains while small vertical events flicker above it. Later, periodic brighter eruptions begin appearing, first widely separated and then in increasingly complicated arrangements.
The track never becomes as spectrally crowded as “lines of dismemberment II” or “ionosphere.” Its power comes from endurance and low-frequency occupation. It holds one region for so long that every new higher sound feels like a rupture.
Toward the final third, those ruptures become more frequent. The fissure widens.
“ionosphere” immediately moves upward. Large repeating columns of sound extend much higher through the spectrum, appearing at regular intervals across the first half. The pattern resembles enormous electronic breaths or pressure fronts. Each recurrence occupies enough frequency space to feel architectural rather than percussive.
Then the second half becomes increasingly dense.
Individual blocks start overlapping. The lower foundation thickens. The upper spectrum fills. What began as separated events gradually becomes a nearly continuous atmosphere. The title fits because this piece seems less concerned with objects than with layers, regions and charged fields.
It is also one of the loudest sustained tracks here. Where “opening triangulated” slowly approaches and recedes, “ionosphere” keeps increasing its occupation of the available space until the listener is effectively inside it.
“oubliettes the circuitsclosed” ends the cassette with the widest dynamic journey of all eleven tracks. The first minute is extraordinarily restrained. Low pulses appear against a nearly empty background, each one surrounded by enough silence to be counted easily.
Then the floor rises.
A low drone begins accumulating around the pulses. Around two minutes in, large sweeping shapes begin arching upward through the spectrum. They recur irregularly, each one briefly exposing higher frequencies before collapsing downward again.
The middle of the piece is much heavier than the beginning, but it never becomes frantic. Instead the circuits seem to be slowly closing. Each new layer reduces the amount of empty space available.
Then the opposite process begins.
During the final minute the recording loses weight rapidly. The pulses become isolated again. Higher information disappears. By the final seconds, almost everything that had accumulated has drained away.
The cassette ends not with an impact but with subtraction.
That arc makes the interior photograph particularly interesting. Open the J-card and the abstract black-and-white exterior suddenly gives way to a bright color photograph of men with customized motorcycles, including a large three-wheeled machine filling most of the frame. Metal tubing, engine components, wheels, cables, luggage and mechanical assemblies occupy the image. One person holds a small handheld device toward the camera. The right edge becomes another cropped fragment of ground and scattered objects.
The relationship to the music does not need to be literal to work. Counting Pulsations constantly converts machinery into something almost organic and organic repetition into something mechanical. Electronic cycles breathe. Drones behave like pressure systems. Rapid pulses harden into surfaces. A pulse can resemble a motor, but after enough repetition a motor can resemble a heartbeat.
Then there is the glitter cassette.
It might be the most appropriate part of the physical edition. Each gold particle is discrete and countable. There are simply too many of them to make counting worthwhile.
That is also what Basses-Terres does throughout these sixty minutes.
One pulse.
Another pulse.
Another.
Another.
At some point quantity changes perception.
The listener stops counting.
The pulsations remain.
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