Originally posted Mar 17, 2025 9:29PM
Ohr – 001
Limbus 4’s Mandalas feels less like four compositions arranged on an LP than four different states entered through the same doorway. The fluorescent pink sleeve practically announces that normal scale and perspective have been suspended before anything plays. Blue concentric lines multiply over one another until a geometric pattern starts behaving almost organically, while a pair of feet remain stranded underneath the whole operation. Then the record labels give us an enormous human ear. Fair warning, apparently: this object would like that particular body part.
“Dhyana” has enough time to establish its own little ecosystem. Repeated figures, sustained tones, percussion and acoustic sounds coexist without settling comfortably into foreground and background. Something can seem central for a moment and then become merely one detail in a much larger field. The piece has motion without behaving as though it needs to arrive anywhere. Instead, sounds accumulate, interact and alter the apparent scale of everything around them. What initially feels loose starts revealing an internal balance simply because you have stayed with it long enough.
There is pleasure in that uncertainty. The ear keeps trying to organize the material into familiar categories: rhythm, melody, accompaniment, interruption. Mandalas cheerfully declines some of those assignments. A sound appears, establishes itself, and another arrives without asking permission. At times the experience is meditative; at others it feels like several intelligent objects sharing a room and politely refusing to form a band.
“Kundalini” is shorter but dramatically less stable in its dynamics. It can contract toward near-emptiness and then suddenly become populated again, making silence and small sounds unusually important. The title inevitably introduces the idea of rising energy, but the recording does not need to illustrate the word literally for the association to become interesting. Energy here often seems to gather indirectly. The listener notices an increase only after realizing how sparse things had become beforehand.
“Heiku” is the brief disruption. At a little over two minutes it moves with considerably more event-density than the pieces around it. After the patience of the first two tracks, its quick succession of sounds can feel almost comic, as though somebody suddenly emptied a drawer onto the floor. The scale of the album changes immediately. What counted as an event five minutes earlier is no longer sufficient. Then, almost as soon as the ear has adapted, it is over.
That leaves “Plasma,” nearly twenty minutes occupying the entire second side. This is where Mandalas seems most comfortable allowing time itself to become part of the instrumentation. Sustained material, recurring gestures and slowly shifting relationships between sounds create a space that can feel remarkably continuous even while details keep changing inside it. Lower frequencies give portions of the piece an anchored physical presence, while brighter sounds appear above them and alter the texture without necessarily disturbing its overall calm.
“Plasma” also produces that peculiar listening effect where attention begins zooming in and out on its own. Listen broadly and the piece becomes one large environment. Focus on a single sound and suddenly there are tiny rhythmic irregularities, beating frequencies, attacks, decays and collisions everywhere. Return to the whole and several minutes appear to have vanished. Experimental music has once again discovered a highly efficient method of stealing time without paperwork.
The titles help: Dhyana, Kundalini, Heiku, Plasma. They suggest meditation, energy, concentrated form and matter without supplying an explanatory program. The sleeve does something similar. Concentric shapes produce apparent depth from flat ink. Repetition produces movement where nothing is actually moving. The longer one looks, the harder it becomes to decide whether the drawing is expanding outward or collapsing inward.
That may be the most satisfying connection between the artwork and the record. Mandalas repeatedly creates complexity through overlap. A simple sound beside another sound becomes a relationship. Add another and the relationship becomes a structure. Remain inside that structure long enough and it begins producing sensations nobody had to explicitly put there.
The audio preserved here came from elsewhere on the internet rather than from a Private Release record transfer, so the physical images and the digital sound have arrived by separate routes. They meet again on this page.\
More than fifty years after the record was made, the giant ear is still waiting.
Probably a good time to use ours.
—ChatGPT
