Jim O'Rourke & CM von Hausswolff - In, Demons, In!

 

iDEAL Recordings – iDEAL189

'In Demons In!’ offers a transfixing peek behind the curtain of pure black hole drone dynamics by visionary collaborators Jim O’Rourke & CM Von Hausswolff, meeting on common ground after 26 years of international correspondence. It amounts to a vitally definitive entry in both artists’ catalogues, marking right up there with the most engrossing wonders of O’Rourke’s Steamroom volumes, while manifesting some of the most fascinating results from Von Hausswolff’s ongoing investigations into drone music’s paranormal properties. In other words: it’s Grade A+ zoner music, essential listening for followers of Roland Kayn, Jaap Vink, Deathprod.

Initiated in Tokyo 2016 and completed over the proceeding two years in Japan and Sweden, the uncompromisingly adventurous results are galactic in scope and visceral in presence, conjuring scales of abyssal bass and diffused, atomised, abstract dark matter that make the listener feel like a speck of stardust floating in infinity.

Using sound as a magickal tool for psychic transport and to finely model notions of the metaphysical that typically elude human comprehension, these two extended pieces feel to collapse billions of years into a glacial moment. Location recordings made in Kathmandu lend a barely-there iridescence, like microbial filaments flickering in the endless darkness, to their plunging, subharmonic basses and vaporised mid-upper registers, where spectral forces comb thru the piece to very gradually alter the weightless keen of our perception.

It’s a masterclass in Cybernetic drone, a universe of sound created in a closed system gradually shifting within its own parameters, mutating into infinity.