Ever lock your gaze on a fractal animation and have the dizzying impression you were tumbling into the screen? The British multimedia artist Lucas Dupuy’s recent exhibition One panoramic view after another will unfold operates on a similar principle. His artworks begin as airbrush studies, which he then photographs and rephotographs, zooming in on smaller and smaller details, drilling down to microscopic levels of granularity. Only at the end of this iterative process does he hit solid ground: Having achieved the desired tangle of lines, he pulls out his pigments and paints the ropy forms on heavy burlap, the fabric’s pits and threads giving the piece a three-dimensional, larger-than-life quality.
If Dupuy’s paintings are a way of removing the artist’s hand from the equation, the same goes for HEAL, his collaboration with the Berlin-based ambient musician Pavel Milyakov (aka Buttechno). This is not their first time working together; that’s Dupuy’s artwork on the cover of pmxper, Milyakov’s 2023 album with Perila, part of a visual discography that also includes sleeves for labels like AD 93, Warm Winters Ltd., and Muscut. This time, Dupuy took part in the music as well. HEAL began with a collection of the British artist’s synthesizer sketches, along with field recordings he made in Japan; he passed those off to Milyakov, who fed the lot through Quantum, a custom-built software instrument whose complex modulations and unpredictable signal paths are designed to coax surprising mutations out of sampled material. Like Dupuy with his scanner and paintbrushes, Milyakov became part editor, part composer, part conductor of a synthetic orchestra with a mind of its own.
The results, however, sound anything but chaotic. Chalk that up, perhaps, to Milyakov’s own predilection for ambient at its gauziest. The album’s palette is heavy on vaporous synthesizer pads, gentle chimes, and cottony clouds of white noise; its rhythms churn with the slow, reassuring regularity of rolling surf. The artists say that they were inspired by ’90s ambient and new age—in particular, the pastel synthscapes of St.GIGA, a bygone Japanese satellite radio broadcaster famous for its longform ambient and environmental shows—and you can certainly hear those influences in HEAL’s balmy drift. Birdsong and running water trace winding routes through “path,” a snapshot of forest idyll illuminated by soft major chords. Downtuned pan pipes bob lazily through “Flutes of Doom,” whose muggy psychedelia suggests a vintage new-age cassette, still sheathed in its yellowing shrinkwrap, lying between tarnished crystals and dried-out sticks of palo santo in a shopworn Woodstock hippie emporium.
But HEAL never feels like mere pastiche. The emotions are too ambivalent for that, the structures too ambiguous. The opening “room” is alive with the unpredictable bustle of brushed jazz drums, nestled so low in the mix they’re barely noticeable. “deep gtr” weaves what might be pitched-down marimba and dubbed-out guitar into a meditative track reminiscent of classic Biosphere, out-of-sync delay chains stretching teasingly out of earshot. The bucolic scenery darkens on “air X,” in which bursts of static buffet pale, fluttering synth figures. Where rhythms appear, they feel accidental, the tangled response to two or more objects colliding in space, or stumbling down a corridor of effects. There are few events in these pieces; very rarely does anything happen that might reveal the actions of the musicians behind the curtain. They feel more like snapshots of infinite processes, and they barely change during their allotted runtimes.
That glimpse of eternity stretches outward on “end,” the simplest and the longest of the album’s tracks by a wide margin. For more than 18 minutes, a cluster of tones hovers like a gaseous cloud; it trembles and shivers, revealing the merest hint of movement, but the overall picture is anything but static. The song sounds like a chorus of church bells that have been ringing forever, obliterating all memory of the time before the din began. For all its outward formlessness, though, it has a magnetism akin to Dupuy’s fractal inspirations. As the track drones on, it seems to expand, pulling you into its depths—engrossing, all-consuming, and vertiginous in its seemingly endless plunge. It’s a stunning finale made all the more powerful for the way it erases every last trace of human scale.
