If meaning doesn't exist in sound, rest assured man will invent it. Stapling significance to twisted words is easy enough, but exposition exists in lyric-free music as well: Whether it's the pinnacle of a post-rock ascent or the midpoint of a 20-minute Phill Niblock shift from a major to a minor, the propensity to find narrative, structure, and terminal purpose-- customarily, the province of words-- is only natural.
But the audience isn't alone. Composers, too, are interested in the implicit plotlines of instrumental passages. After all, if a piece is nothing but sound, who can connect to it and hear it as art reflecting their life? Even an ostensible ascetic like LaMonte Young, who has spent the past 40 years composing a piece called "The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys", told Richard Kostelanetz in 1966: "My own feeling has always been that if people just aren't carried away to heaven, I'm failing." Heaven, hell, limbo? It doesn't matter, as long as it's somewhere.
But Phon just is: The Orm, the debut from the Raleigh, N.C. duo of Dustin Dorsey and Drew Robertson, isn't about manifesting storylines, exponential climbs, or ultimate purposes. It's Earth Music, a true-to-life synthesis of textural, noisy quakes amid ambient or agitated sculptures of mixed media. Imagine a welded series of unplanned and incidental accidents shifting against one another to make seamless sense of the senseless.
Over seven edits culled from three days of improvisations recorded at John McEntire's Soma Studios, Phon concern themselves with the character of sound, not the meaning of it. Concrete personalities rarely emerge, but cascades of stimuli constantly do: Phon mine highs and lows for the sake of their nature, juxtaposing the two and allowing them to feed on one another. "Boneless Giants", the disc's 13-minute highlight, roars open with low-end squall fighting back twinkles of reverb guitar. By the time it's over, it has trailed into a multi-tonal essence, irregular waves shifting through one another, eventually falling into "Fourth Beast". The shortest piece here, "Beast" eclipses that coming tranquility with an edge of paranoia, the high-end sharpening layers of fuzz to a metallic luster.
As on "Beast", Phon work best when they deliver something apart from what is promised. When things start to get still, something in the macrocosm mutates: The crust breaks, the elements mix, single cells form and repeat and change everything as lightning-- perhaps a single shard of a pure guitar tone or one percussive click, as on "Anglers and the Orm"-- bounces from the thick substrate. "Anglers" is a nine-minute belly crawl through a sonic palace that finally collapses in ruins. A regular waveform guitar drone with thin peaks and broad valleys is shaken from above by a washing sea of sonic malevolence. Things are built to be demolished, and that exothermic sound validates its own existence.
But meaning takes shape by proxy, and The Orm-- for all of Phon's textural obsession and distended dynamics-- eventually elicits a lesson: The album sounds completely physical, broadcasting in broad, circumspection unconcerned with reality. Every time one sound breaks another, it feels as though another indecision or insufferable mood swing is testing some core's stamina. Sequences of events don't end as much as they initiate another. Pieces get pushed into permanent limbo. Life gets ugly as it gets pretty, and then it tries to get pretty again. Records that make dynamic equilibriums so involving rarely need any narrative. And here, they certainly require no answers.
