Byron Westbrook’s music has always been physical. But over a near-decade of his work as a sound artist and composer, “physical” has mostly meant “spatial.” He’s devoted much of his time to installations and site-specific pieces, exploring the way sound can fill and interact with three-dimensional spaces. On previous releases (under his own name and as Corridors), he has tried to replicate the experience of those projects, perfecting that goal on 2015’s Precipice. Its extended tracks are so rich and textured, they seem to carve out their own virtual environments.
To make his new record, Body Consonance, Westbrook turned his focus to the physicality of the listener. His goal was, he says, “to explore working with sounds that project into the listener’s space as opposed to acting as a window to another place.” He makes this intention clear in the album’s titles, which are filled with references to bodies, movement, and dance. Westbrook’s music matches this corporeal theme, taking on shapes that stretch like muscles and bend like joints. The result is a kind of “body music” that is as much about making sound incarnate as it is about moving and affecting the listener.
Westbrook achieves his body-centric mode through a diverse tool kit. Repetitive sounds and persistent rhythms are a major part of his arsenal, but he also uses drone, texture, stasis, and volume to help forge music that can ring through your bones as if they were tuning forks. At times it feels like he’s actually translating physical substances into sound—or turning aural vibrations into tangible objects. The viscerality of his rhythms and tones adds extra layers of meaning to a track title like, “What We Mean When We Say Body Language.”
The wordless language Westbrook speaks on Body Consonance uses a pretty simple vocabulary. With electronics, guitar, tape, and some computer-based manipulation, he sets up basic parameters for each track, usually a few sounds repeated in loops, and then patiently massages the space between those parameters until it begins to feel infinite. His song structures can seem mathematical; one track title, “Ritual Geometry/Sympathetic Bodies,” could also describe the album’s obsession with patterns. But Westbrook’s melding of sounds—the way he injects thick layers and subtle pulses into every track—puts flesh and blood on his compositional skeletons.
The most exciting demonstrations of Westbrook’s physical alchemy come when he mixes clearly-defined rhythms with enveloping ambience. The best example is “What We Mean When We Say Body Language,” which starts with an insistent, bassy rumble that quickly merges with soaring tones and gliding atmosphere, landing somewhere between dissonant techno (echoing the bristly beats of Fuck Buttons) and post-rock drama. Everything on Body Consonance is a thoughtful mixture of rhythm and abstraction. The rhythms may be more subtle in the rising drone of “Fireworks Choreography” or the Terry Riley-like electronic blips of “Levitation Game.” But ultimately Westbrook is always playing with time and texture, probing the ways that reality’s ticking clock can intersect with illusions of permanence. It’s a heady tack for such physical music to take. Westbrook understands that there’s more to bodies than just skin and bone, and with Body Consonance his sounds cut to the marrow.
