PBK & C. Reider - 2009 - Discorporate

Impulsy Stetoskopu – 017  201.22MB FLAC

Discorporate is a collaboration built from delayed arrival. Phillip B. Klingler and C. Reider had exchanged sounds for years, yet the finished record did not emerge through one concentrated session or a neat schedule of reciprocal deadlines. Their first documented collision appeared back in 1997, when Reider reworked PBK material for “Slow Seed (Heat-Island Effect Mix)” on Headmix. Further source recordings crossed between them, PBK completed his transformations relatively quickly, and Reider held the corresponding material until the work felt possible. More than a decade after the relationship began, a parcel unexpectedly arrived containing the completed master. The delay is not incidental history surrounding the music. It is embedded in the album’s atmosphere. Discorporate sounds like matter that has spent years outside its original body, slowly forgetting the identity of the person who produced it.

The title means to become bodiless, to leave physical form or exist without one. That process describes electronic collaboration with unusual precision. Each artist first produces a sound through some concrete action, instrument, machine, room or recording medium. The source is then detached from that event and sent elsewhere. Once received, it can be filtered, layered, stretched, shortened, reversed or combined with materials its maker never imagined. The sound survives, but its original body is gone. By the time it reaches the finished album, ownership has become wonderfully unstable. PBK’s tracks contain C. Reider without sounding simply like C. Reider, while Reider’s pieces contain PBK after PBK’s gestures have been absorbed into another compositional nervous system.

This is not collaboration through simultaneous performance. The artists do not negotiate in real time, watch each other’s hands or respond to immediate physical cues. Their conversation happens through files and accumulated decisions. One person sends a fragment into absence; the other receives it later and constructs an answer that may radically alter the question. That distance creates a peculiar intimacy. Each composer is allowed inside the other’s sound before the material has been protected by final arrangement. What is exchanged is not a completed track waiting for decoration, but vulnerable matter awaiting another person’s interpretation.

PBK described the result as a new form of twenty-first-century psychedelic drone space music, and the phrase catches the album’s expansive character without reducing it to passive ambience. Psychedelia here does not require rock instrumentation, backward guitars or colorful period references. It occurs through destabilized scale. A faint sound can appear immense once its source has been removed, while a broad drone may contract until it resembles activity occurring inside electrical tissue. Familiar distinctions between foreground and background repeatedly soften. One listens not to objects placed inside a stable environment, but to an environment continually manufacturing and dissolving its own objects.

The first piece establishes this condition slowly enough that the listener can feel ordinary dimensions slipping away. PBK’s treatment of Reider’s source material produces a wide field whose apparent calm is filled with minor turbulence. Tones hang in space, but they are not motionless. Their edges vibrate, darken and admit submerged textures that may have begun as entirely different sounds. PBK has long described his own early work through dense hovering structures and small changes revealed by sustained attention. Here that approach becomes a means of entering another artist’s material. He does not force Reider’s sources to announce what they were. He allows them to lose their biographies and become weather.

The untitled sequence is essential. A descriptive title could tell the listener to imagine machinery, astronomy, dreams or ruined architecture. Numbering leaves the sounds without narrative passports. They move across the album according to texture and pressure rather than literary instruction. This strengthens the collaborative ambiguity because no verbal concept returns the material to one author’s private mythology. The pieces are simply successive states of discorporation.

Reider’s second and third tracks form a compact pair after the broad opening. His compositional method has involved taking raw sources and repeatedly isolating their most suggestive qualities through editing, filtration, equalization and pitch shifting, accumulating many small decisions before assembling the result. That patience can be heard in the sense that every sound has been examined from several sides before being admitted. The second piece feels less like a panorama than a chamber of altered surfaces, while the shorter third track concentrates the material further, almost as though one detail from the previous environment has been enlarged until its internal grain becomes the entire composition.

The contrast between the artists is real but never clean enough to support a simple alternating portrait. PBK often works spontaneously, attempting to thwart his own expectations and allow abstract structures to emerge without predetermined style. Reider’s process is slower and more explicitly sculptural, treating recorded material as something to be cut, filtered and joined through prolonged examination. Yet each is working with the other person’s source. PBK’s spontaneity reacts to Reider’s raw matter; Reider’s patience investigates PBK’s often volatile textures. Their differences become filters through which the partner is heard.

The fourth track returns to PBK and opens another long region, but the album has already taught the ear not to expect a restoration of its beginning. Drone on Discorporate is not a static genre marker. It is the audible consequence of several events being suspended long enough to merge. Layers drift together, produce interference and gradually become one composite presence. The music can feel cosmic because the apparent space is so large, but it also feels strangely domestic and handmade. These are not pristine digital nebulae generated to illustrate infinity. The surfaces retain friction, blur and traces of handling.

That combination gives the album warmth despite its disembodied premise. Electronic abstraction is often described as cold because identifiable human gesture has been removed. Discorporate suggests something more complicated. Bodily identity disappears, yet relationship remains. Every processed sound is evidence that one person listened closely to something another person made. Care survives detachment. The artists may no longer be recognizable through conventional instrumental signatures, but attention becomes their human presence.

The fifth piece, the longest of Reider’s contributions, makes this especially clear. It does not hurry through the supplied material in search of dramatic contrast. Sounds are allowed to coexist long enough for new affinities to form. A low field may hold several sharper events without functioning merely as background; a filtered fragment can hover between noise and tone until the distinction stops mattering. Reider’s composition resembles an ecosystem created from transplanted species. The sources entered from elsewhere, but their behavior has adapted to the new environment.

The short sixth piece works as a final narrowing before PBK’s closing track. Its placement prevents the album from becoming an uninterrupted sequence of similarly scaled drones. Discorporate breathes through changes in duration, density and apparent distance. The shorter works act like apertures opening inside the longer pieces, revealing that the album’s vast spaces are assembled from extremely small decisions. A few minutes can reorganize the memory of the eight-minute field preceding it.

PBK’s seventh track completes the exchange without attempting to reunite the material with its origins. The album does not end by revealing which sounds belonged to whom or by staging a final duet in which both identities become separately visible. Instead, the source-swapping method reaches its logical conclusion. The closing space belongs to PBK as composer, to Reider as source-maker, to both as correspondents and finally to neither once the sound enters the listener’s room. Discorporation is complete when the material can continue without requiring knowledge of the body from which it came.

The cover expresses this beautifully. A pale artificial face emerges through blue-gray vapor, its eyes sharply present while the rest of its form appears to be dissolving. It may be a mask, mannequin, doll, spirit or digitally altered human image. The expression is peaceful enough to avoid straightforward horror, yet its serenity is unsettling because the face seems to possess consciousness without flesh. Smoke passes both behind and across it, making it difficult to tell whether the figure is entering visibility or leaving it.

That ambiguity mirrors the music’s treatment of authorship. We can identify PBK and C. Reider on the cover and in the credits, just as we can identify eyes, nose and mouth in the image. Yet the deeper one enters, the less stable those identities become. Source and composer overlap without becoming interchangeable. The album does not erase difference through a bland collaborative compromise. It allows difference to survive as an invisible force shaping matter from within.

Impulsy Stetoskopu’s handmade edition of 120 copies gave this bodiless music a deliberately fragile body. The label’s envelopes, inserts and small editions often transformed experimental recordings into pieces of correspondence, which is especially appropriate here. Discorporate began through exchange and delay, then entered the world as another object intended to travel between hands. The physical disc temporarily fixed a process built from migration.

Its later digital reappearance adds another chapter. C. Reider returned the album to circulation in 2019, explaining the long gestation and identifying who transformed each set of sources. PBK issued another archival edition through Bandcamp in 2026. Track lengths differ by a second or two between these versions, and the visual credits are presented slightly differently, small reminders that an archive does not preserve one eternally fixed body. Every edition is another incarnation through which the same music passes.

The record’s quiet power lies in refusing to make collaboration sound heroic. There is no grand summit where two masters combine strengths and become louder than either could alone. The achievement is more subtle. Each artist makes room for the other by surrendering control over what his source recordings will mean. The finished pieces show that loss of control need not lead to chaos. It can produce an identity that neither participant could have designed in isolation.

Discorporate is psychedelic because it alters the perceived boundaries of things. It is drone because duration allows that alteration to become physically convincing. It is space music because the sounds construct distances no microphone originally recorded. Most of all, it is correspondence music, created through patience, unfinished obligation and the faith that material sent away may eventually return carrying a life of its own.

The face on the cover never completely vanishes. The eyes remain visible through the vapor, just as each artist remains faintly perceptible within the other’s work. Discorporation does not mean annihilation. The body is lost, but influence continues moving. A sound crosses years, formats and compositional identities, finally arriving in another room where nobody can say with certainty whose breath is disturbing the air.