Dissolution Grip exists outside of time and place, while deep inside them both. As might be expected given his back catalogue, each of the sounds on KMRU’s latest project started as a location-specific field recording, but were ultimately sculpted and retooled in the image of an orchestra, giving up their origins in the pursuit of beauty.
And while their birthplace might have been obscured, the synth-like tracks fizz with a vibrancy that can only have been born in the field. Take digital bonus track ‘Along A Wall’, which manipulates the sound of wind shaking his family’s Kenyan compound to its foundations. There are no longer any obvious or easily decoded markers that reveal its roots, but something of the moment’s vitality lives on in the track’s blanketing surges and gentler recesses.
The three pieces mesmerisingly unfold at a glacial pace, walking a delicate line between drone and symphony and occasionally recalling Pauline Oliveros and her techniques. Emulating her pioneering use of tape loops with new technologies, KMRU finds a way to honour the memory of a sound while stripping it and refashioning it completely.
The resultant album is both comforting and intriguing, with each track standing alone as an accomplished composition, absorbing and releasing its audience, but sitting within a whole that similarly rushes and recedes. It demands a patience and curiosity from the listener, but one that’s well rewarded over its brief runtime. It is perfectly titled: Dissolution Grip’s sense of self holds fast in the face of disintegration.
