When the multi-instrumentalist and visual artist Tim Koh was three or four years old, Elvis Presley’s 1973 concert from Hawaii played regularly on the family’s newly acquired color television. “I had a fuzzy, round pillow that I’d stand on as a stage and pretend to perform [on],” he told the Talkhouse. Eventually, he found actual stages to play on and spent some two decades working with fellow travelers including Animal Collective, Hieroglyphic Being, DJ Harvey, and No Age. Now based in Berlin, Koh recently began a kind of email-based game of exquisite corpse with L.A.-based graphic and sound designer Sun An, who’d been releasing his own music for over a decade.
Salt and Sugar Look the Same unfolds the results of their back-and-forth across some 18 miniatures that sound like half-overheard conversations only half-remembered. Sine waves ripple and snap; warm whooshes of melody float tropically in the mist; voices sing at uncanny speeds. All this is nothing exactly new—deja vu put to disc has a legacy going back at least to Erik Satie, passing through the eternal Éliane Radigue hum and still unparalleled otherworldliness of early Boards of Canada records. But part of the point of this kind of communication is the generous recognition of the familiar. Friendship sprouts from common ground.
Opener “Bye Bye Betty” sends a voice message, made mechanically variable in pitch and speed, over wires of acoustic guitars; by “Besafe Airtel,” the wires tangle into brambles. Tracks like “Old Plates and Desirable Traits” and “Drawing to Relax and Pass the Time” build little worlds of acoustic and electric sources, the former with a bit of new-wave froideur and the latter so warm and wet you could get bitten by all the little buzzing things flying around. It’s a rare bit of muchness on an otherwise restrained record: “The Maybes Are Endless” distills everything to two chords strummed on an electric guitar, a rocking chair blues.
There are also synesthetic aims. “Yume-No-Yume” curls in the air like its namesake incense, often a combination of plum and cherry blossoms and lavender designed to help the sniffer remember dreams. “Incense Holder,” with its glinting glitches, also plays as it’s named, a faceted structure to hold ineffable sound. And the golden plumes of “Lemongrass Citronella” are powerful enough to keep those biters at bay.
It’s not all bliss, though. “Today Only Happens Once” approaches a kind of industrial unease that seems equally nostalgic for Throbbing Gristle and the occult grooviness of Scooby Doo soundtracks. Some tracks plank—the drone of “Somewhere in Time,” for example, suspends itself with rickety strength and the echo of sweat—and others, like “Twice” ache like the memory of exertion. A high-pitched whistle cuts through foggy closer “Expected to Fade” like a tea kettle—time to wake up—before a thick blanket of hiss drags you under. This is music more for giving in than letting go.
Across these 38 minutes, Koh and An are talking to each other, talking to themselves, and listening in. I heard ghosts from my own past and saw projections of what I imagine their lives might be, to the point where I felt like I could draw my own notes into the folds. Contained within are noises of pleasure and of pain; of wrapping an arm around the warm shoulder of a lover and letting go of a friend hypnotized by their rage; of stoned teenage pals and hallucinating adult companions and the comedown of middle age; and, above all, the curious grief of childhood, when being a kid seems to only mean finding out how big the world is and how little say you have in it. For me, it’s all in “Can’t Stand in the Past,” which shifts unsteadily on drums so epically slowed that their skins become fuzzy, round pillows, little islands, miniature ersatz stages for us to perform our own remembering and becoming.
