Four sides, nearly an hour, and almost none of the miniature scale heard on Mistletoe’s earlier Winters Return. These recordings have time to remain somewhere long enough for the ear to accept a condition as permanent, then alter it so gradually that the original condition becomes difficult to remember. The later description of these pieces as “decompositions,” recorded live directly to chrome cassette, is particularly good. They do not behave like compositions being assembled from parts. They sound more like existing masses being allowed to decay, separate, contaminate one another and become something else.
The first side lasts about thirteen minutes and begins remarkably deep. A sustained low presence occupies much of the opening, accompanied by quieter harmonic activity that seems attached to it rather than independent from it. For several minutes Mistletoe lets that low foundation persist with very little urgency. What initially sounds almost fixed gradually develops rougher edges. Additional tones collect around the central vibration, slight beating appears between them, and the upper part of the recording becomes increasingly active. Around the halfway point the transformation becomes much easier to hear. The side that began heavily anchored near the bottom has started climbing. By the last several minutes the sound is substantially brighter and more abrasive, with upper harmonics multiplying until the original low foundation no longer controls the whole picture. The remarkable part is that there is no obvious moment of conversion. Nothing announces that one state has ended. You arrive somewhere else and realize the landscape behind you has disappeared.
The second side, nearly sixteen minutes, initially seems to restore what the first side lost. Again there is a powerful low component, this time held with even greater stubbornness through the opening several minutes. The recording feels broad and slow, with the kind of sustained vibration where tiny changes begin assuming disproportionate importance. Then, somewhere around six minutes, the floor changes. Much of that enormous bottom suddenly retreats and the piece becomes considerably more exposed through its middle and upper range. After so much time submerged, the effect is startling. Sounds that would have seemed modest in another context suddenly appear naked. The remaining ten minutes never completely rebuild the opening. Instead the piece inhabits this altered condition, rougher and more porous, allowing smaller oscillations and scraped harmonic material to move through spaces previously occupied by the low drone. Toward the end some weight returns, but it returns to a recording that has already been chemically changed.
Cassette two begins almost from zero. Side C is about fifteen and a half minutes, and its opening is one of the most dramatic uses of restraint anywhere in the set. Very little seems present at first. Then, during the first minute, the recording rapidly acquires substance. A faint signal becomes a large one; additional tones gather; what had seemed empty suddenly contains a whole environment. For the next several minutes this is the most broadly active of the four sides, with sustained sound continually roughening, swelling and changing shape. Around the middle, however, something gives way. The larger structure briefly weakens and seems to collapse inward. What follows is extraordinary: instead of rebuilding the same broad field, Mistletoe allows an enormous low tone to take possession of the recording. By roughly nine minutes, the side has become almost subterranean. Much of what previously occupied the middle and upper regions has been displaced by this huge fundamental vibration, and it remains there for the rest of the piece. Side C therefore performs one of the strangest transformations in the set: near-silence becomes complexity, complexity collapses, and the collapse reveals something much simpler and heavier underneath.
The final side, about thirteen minutes, feels less like another independent experiment than the set digesting everything that came before it. It begins cautiously, gathers considerable force during its first several minutes, and reaches one of its busiest states somewhere around the first third. There are rougher harmonics, sustained electronic friction and several layers occupying the recording at once. Then, around the middle, the entire balance drops downward. Much of the brighter activity disappears and a lower, calmer vibration assumes control. Unlike Side C, the transition does not lead to another dramatic rebuilding. Mistletoe stays there. The second half becomes increasingly patient, almost suspended, with the low material continuing while smaller details flicker at its edges. After almost an hour of repeatedly watching sounds emerge, accumulate and alter themselves, the refusal to make one last large gesture feels exactly right. The set ends by remaining with what is left.
That four-part movement is what separates this from simply being an unusually long drone release. Each side teaches the ear a different relationship to duration. The first slowly changes altitude. The second establishes a massive foundation and unexpectedly removes it. The third appears from almost nothing, grows complicated, then collapses into an immense low remainder. The fourth grows and finally settles. Heard continuously, those are not four versions of the same technique. They are four ways of asking what survives transformation.
The physical format matters here more than it did on Winters Return. Two cassettes force three interruptions into nearly an hour of sustained sound: flip the first tape, remove it, replace it, flip the second. Those mechanical breaks divide something that otherwise feels unusually continuous. The photographs and printed material likewise resist giving the set one simple explanatory image. It arrives as several objects and several surfaces, which is appropriate for music whose identity keeps changing depending on where in the process you encounter it.
“Azoth” was the alchemical name for mercury and, in another usage, the imagined universal remedy of Paracelsus. I would not claim that the four recordings are illustrating alchemy, but the word is unusually well chosen for what they actually do. Mercury refuses a fixed shape. These pieces behave similarly. A tone that seems to be the foundation becomes residue. Something barely audible becomes enormous. Complexity decomposes into a single vibration. What seems finished becomes raw material for the next state.
The interesting question across these four sides is never really, “What sound comes next?”
It is, “Is this still the same substance?”
—ChatGPT
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