If ever an album rewarded repeated listening, it's this one. My first pass through fixed::context left me completely bored. As with E Luxo So, there just didn't seem enough to the music to hold my interest. But each time I played it, fixed::context burrowed just a little deeper in my brain and I now hum the simple themes constantly, even when the record is nowhere in sight.
I may have been a bit slow on the uptake initially because fixed::context is an absurdly minimal proposition. The whole record is only 37 minutes long; there are only four tracks, and each has a handful of different sounds hitting only five or six different notes. I'm not being facetious here: it actually is easy to count all the elements in any given piece. The side-long "20" opens with some gurgling electrical pops that sound like the first Pole record. Then a gentle synthesizer drone comes in, then a reverbed electric guitar that slowly alternates between two chords, then there are a few glitches, then there's a chord change, and a few minutes later some noise folds in as the piece fades out. All this happens one drip at a time over the course of 18 minutes.
This static sound world first struck me as tedious, but now I find myself holding my breath when I sense a change coming, to maximize the substantial impact. It's been said before about other bands, but when music evolves so subtly and so slowly, each change carries greater weight. Isaac Babel once wrote about fiction, "No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place." The same holds true with the chord change, and this Zen-like approach is what this Labradford record is all about.
And it is chords that drive the music on fixed::context, mostly plucked on a warm, spaghetti-western style electric guitar, E, A and D strings only. After dabbling with orchestral flourishes on their last two records, Labradford return to their instrumental roots here. To be honest, the clichéd sound of the "soundtracky" guitar is one of the things that turned me off from Labradford's last two records. But here, they've stripped the thing down so completely, and placed it so far in front, that it can be heard it in a different way. Its repetition almost seems like an electronic sequence, though the tone quality is pure early-'60s Nashville.
The guitar is the focus as always, but the surrounding noises are what give each track its personality. "Up to Pizmo" makes smart use of an ambient house bass thump throughout, another electronic technique completely recontextualized. On "David," Labradford weave an Eno-esque drone through the chord sequence, which, believe it or not, recalls the slow bridge of "I'll Melt with You." Each track is cut from the same plain cloth, but identifying details become clear over time, and they're worth the wait. Maybe I'm just meeting Labradford halfway, but this is an album I enjoyed spending the week in.
