Lukas De Clerck - 2024 - The Telescopic Aulos of Atlas

 

Ideologic Organ – SOMA046  221.30MB FLAC

Ideologic Organ is the kind of label that gradually teaches a listener how to recognize it without requiring the records to resemble one another. The connecting substance is not a particular genre, instrument or production method. It is a way of framing sound as a complete object of thought. A release may contain archival ritual singing, pipe organ, synthesis, drone, chamber composition or an instrument that did not exist until someone imagined it, yet each arrives with the feeling that it has been carefully extracted from a much larger hidden world. Stephen O’Malley’s curation and visual direction give the catalog the coherence of an evolving exhibition. Every album is autonomous, but placing one beside another reveals corridors between them. The Telescopic Aulos of Atlas belongs naturally within that structure because it is simultaneously a recording, an invented instrument, an archaeological speculation, a sculptural object and a document of the building in which it came alive.

Lukas De Clerck’s subject is the aulos, the ancient double-reed, double-pipe instrument associated with Greek and Roman life but absent from European musical practice for more than a millennium. Enough physical remains and visual representations survive for researchers to know something of its construction, posture and social presence, but the continuous tradition that would explain exactly how it was played has disappeared. There is no uninterrupted school passing down correct embouchure, repertory, ornamentation and technique. This absence could have produced a conservative project devoted to making the most historically plausible replica possible. De Clerck instead treats the missing information as creative space. He studies what remains, learns to build and control the reeds, and then asks what the aulos might become if reintroduced as a contemporary instrument rather than displayed as an obedient reconstruction of antiquity.

The telescopic aulos is therefore not a claim about what ancient musicians definitely possessed. It is a speculative descendant, or perhaps an ancestor invented after the fact. Unlike surviving models with finger holes, De Clerck’s instrument consists of metal tubes whose nested sections can slide outward and inward, changing their effective length and pitch. The mechanism is closer to a trombone than a conventional woodwind. The two reeds generate simultaneous streams of vibration while the moving pipes continually alter their relationship. Instead of selecting notes from a fixed scale, De Clerck navigates a continuum. Pitch becomes liquid, unstable and physical. Intervals approach one another, collide and produce audible beating patterns. The instrument can sound like two primitive synthesizer oscillators, except the electrical current has been replaced by breath and the circuitry is made from reed fibre, saliva, metal and muscular pressure.

This relationship between antiquity and synthesis is central to the album’s strange power. The listener may know intellectually that a single person is blowing into an acoustic instrument, yet much of the sound seems electronic. Tones pulse without a visible sequencer. Frequencies interfere as though two oscillators are being detuned. Overtones gather into phantom voices, bowed strings, alarms, insect swarms and electrical hum. The illusion is not produced by disguising the aulos with elaborate studio manipulation. All five pieces were performed live. What sounds technologically alien emerges from one of the oldest basic musical systems imaginable: air causing reeds to open and close. The album collapses the distance between the archaic and futuristic because both can be understood as technologies for organizing vibration.

“Jot’s Phorbeia” begins with the part of the apparatus most closely attached to the performer’s body. A phorbeia is the strap or mouth harness historically associated with aulos playing, used to stabilize the cheeks and embouchure while the player maintains pressure. Jot Fau created both the phorbeia and the performer’s jacket, extending the project beyond instrument building into clothing, restraint and bodily engineering. This first piece accordingly feels like an initiation into a system where freedom depends upon control. De Clerck must bind and discipline the mouth in order to release sounds that appear wildly unstable. The tones tremble, divide and grind against one another, but their volatility is supported by considerable physical endurance. What initially resembles raw exhalation reveals itself as the product of practiced circular breathing, reed adjustment and sustained muscular balance.

The title also quietly acknowledges that this supposedly solo music is the result of collaboration. De Clerck conceived the instrument, but Noir Métal fabricated its tubes, Jot Fau made the bodily equipment, Emile Barret photographed the project, and Frédéric Alstadt mixed and mastered the recordings. The album’s solitude is populated. One person stands before the microphone, yet many people’s skills have already entered the sound. This resembles Ideologic Organ’s broader function. O’Malley does not impose one sonic signature upon the musicians he releases. He builds conditions under which extremely particular practices can become visible, audible and physically present. Curation here is less like selecting items for sale than constructing an ecosystem in which unusual work can survive.

“Singing Phragmites of Pont’Etzu” names the reed plant itself, Phragmites, as though the material remembers that it was once alive and has begun singing independently of the musician. De Clerck has spoken of the reed’s tubular memory, the natural tendency of its fibres to open and close under pressure. This gives the instrument an almost collaborative will. The player does not merely command an inert tool. He negotiates with two sensitive organic valves that respond to humidity, force, shaping and minute variations in the mouth. The long tones on this piece begin producing spectral consequences beyond their apparent sources. Beating frequencies form secondary rhythms, and high overtones hover above the fundamental pitches until something resembling distant choral singing seems to appear. The mind hears voices because the interacting tones provide just enough information for perception to assemble a choir that is not physically present.

This is psychoacoustic music in the most direct sense. Rather than using electronics to manufacture auditory illusions, De Clerck places two living oscillators into unstable proximity and lets the listener’s hearing complete the composition. The music does not end at the speaker. It continues inside the ear, where combinations of frequencies create additional pulses, pitches and imagined textures. Different rooms, playback systems and listening positions may reveal different internal activity. Walking through the space while the recording plays could change the apparent balance of the tones, causing certain vibrations to bloom while others nearly vanish. The piece is therefore not fixed in the ordinary manner. Its identity includes the acoustic behavior of every room it enters.

“The Cats of Medir” exposes the project’s playful side. A title like this refuses the grave academic posture that can surround reconstructed ancient instruments. De Clerck’s aulos squeals, yowls, chatters and appears to discover animal personalities within its sliding tubes. There is something liberating in hearing an object associated with archaeological study become unruly. The instrument is not forced to demonstrate cultural importance or reproduce an imagined ceremonial purity. It is allowed to behave badly. Ancient accounts often placed the aulos on the Dionysian side of Greek culture, connected with bodily excitement, intoxication, theatre, dance and sounds considered rougher or less orderly than the idealized lyre. De Clerck does not attempt to recreate a historical Dionysian performance, but the instrument’s abrasive humor and unstable physicality recover some of that opposition to polished, mathematically contained beauty.

The track titles throughout the album strengthen this invented folklore. Pont’Etzu, Medir, Jot and the gargling aulete sound as though they belong to a half-preserved mythology whose documents were scattered or never written. De Clerck does not use the prestige of ancient Greece to give the album false authority. He introduces odd names, cats, bodily noises and material accidents, preventing the project from becoming a marble museum display. The imaginary world surrounding the telescopic aulos remains porous. Research enters fantasy; fabrication enters history; humor keeps reverence from turning into obedience.

“Sacrifice of a Reed,” the album’s thirteen-minute center, brings the organic source of the sound toward exhaustion. Reeds are not permanent. They soften, crack, change character and eventually fail. The musician’s breath animates them while also contributing to their deterioration. Calling this process a sacrifice transforms maintenance into ritual. A small piece of plant fibre gives up its stable physical form so that vibration can exist. The title may sound mythological, but it describes an ordinary truth of reed playing: sound consumes its own mechanism. Each performance slightly alters the material required for the next.

The piece’s extended length allows the instrument to become an environment rather than a novelty. At first the listener may concentrate on identifying how the sound is produced. That curiosity gradually becomes less important as the tones accumulate density and duration. The two pipes no longer seem like separate voices. Their interference generates a whirring mass that can suggest bagpipes, bowed metal, industrial machinery, throat singing or a dense electronic drone. Breath becomes architectural. De Clerck seems to hold up a ceiling made from vibration, pausing only when the body’s need for air reasserts itself. Those interruptions are essential. They remind us that the apparent machine has lungs.

This is where the album’s relationship with O’Malley’s world becomes especially clear, though it does not sound like Sunn O))) in any simplistic sense. The connection lies in the understanding of sustained tone as physical structure. A long vibration is not merely a note held for an unusual amount of time. Duration allows every component of the sound to become magnified: distortion, breath, beating, resonance, bodily effort and the room’s response. O’Malley’s own work has repeatedly treated time as a space that listeners enter. De Clerck reaches a related condition through radically different means. Instead of amplified guitar and enormous speaker pressure, he uses two reeds, sliding metal pipes and the resonant body of a former brewery. Both approaches discover that apparent stasis is crowded with motion.

Brasserie Atlas is not merely where the sessions happened. The telescopic aulos was developed there while the former Brussels brewery was being used as a temporary living and working environment. Noir Métal built the tubes there, and a former water reservoir in the cellar provided resonance for the instrument’s first sounds. The name Atlas becomes wonderfully overdetermined. It identifies the building, but it also invokes the mythic figure condemned to support the sky. The instrument itself stands upright like a miniature industrial monument, its extended tubes carrying columns of air. De Clerck must support those tones with breath, holding an invisible acoustic weight until the body can no longer continue.

The building also binds the album to a different kind of archaeology. Ancient pipes are reconstructed inside twentieth-century industrial ruins. A discontinued instrument is reborn within a brewery that has ceased serving its original purpose. Both structures survive by becoming something other than what they were built to be. The metal aulos does not restore the lost musical culture of Greece, and the artistic occupation does not restore beer production at Atlas. Each activates a historical shell through imaginative reuse. The album therefore contains multiple layers of abandoned technology: ancient musical practice, industrial architecture, metal fabrication and modern recording all nested inside one another like the telescopic sections of the pipes.

“A Gargling Aulete” closes the record by returning the instrument to the wet, awkward fact of the mouth. After the monumental implications of Atlas, sacrifice and archaeo-musicological research, we are left with a performer gargling. The title punctures any remaining desire to treat the aulete as a remote priestly figure. Breath instruments are intimate machines full of condensation, pressure, tongue movement and bodily noise. De Clerck does not clean away that vulnerability. The final piece makes the instrument sound comic, sick, animate and slightly obscene. It ends the album not with historical resolution but with a throat-like creature continuing to discover what noises its new anatomy permits.

The cover image perfectly condenses this condition. The telescopic aulos rests against a weathered brown surface, surrounded by reeds and rings. It could be an archaeological specimen arranged for documentation, an industrial prototype waiting for assembly, a ceremonial object or a minimalist sculpture. The clean black base and vertical tubes carry the severity associated with Ideologic Organ’s visual universe, while the rusty ground prevents the object from floating in sterile abstraction. The instrument has been made, touched, breathed through and placed within a material world. It looks simultaneously ancient and newly unpacked.

This is one reason following Ideologic Organ through its catalog numbers can become so absorbing. The label does not merely promise more music resembling whatever release first caught the listener. It promises another carefully framed encounter with a practice that may otherwise remain invisible. O’Malley’s thread is curatorial rather than stylistic. He recognizes works that can sustain an entire physical and conceptual world around themselves, then gives each world enough visual continuity to join the larger constellation without losing its own atmosphere. Discovering the label release by release becomes a form of travel. Each object opens a different chamber, but the architecture connecting them slowly becomes perceptible.

The Telescopic Aulos of Atlas may be described as experimental archaeology, but it is equally an argument against allowing missing history to become a dead zone. The absence of a complete ancient manual does not condemn the aulos to silence. It creates an invitation to listen speculatively. De Clerck respects the surviving evidence while refusing to become imprisoned by it. His instrument might never have existed before now, yet once its sound enters the world, it becomes part of the aulos’s history. The timeline bends backward and forward at once. Something extinct acquires a future it was never promised.

What finally makes the album compelling is that all of its research, craft and conceptual elegance remain subordinate to the physical astonishment of the sound. Two reeds vibrate. Air passes through metal. Frequencies collide, and an invisible population of voices, insects, machines and animals emerges. The theory explains how the doorway was built, but the music is what comes through it. Anyone familiar with aulos reconstruction, Brasserie Atlas, the instrument’s collaborators or the hidden acoustic effects within these recordings could add another valuable layer. This is not a recovered tradition with its questions settled. It is a living instrument whose mythology has only just started accumulating.