This album is a total fetish property. Regardless of what's even on it, it just looks like something you'd want to have sitting on your shelf: a carefully considered gatefold package, all duochrome design, featuring mathematical grid patterns on the outside, and cards inside sporting washed out photos of, well, picturesque views-- though it's safe to say that anyone picking this thing up will find them hard to ignore. Even the sans serif type seems carefully considered and laid out, in spite of all its utilitarian exposition about the music contained on the CD. Indeed, upstart Australian label Room40 appears to be making this packaging strategy a central tenet of its image, as all of their releases are similarly lavish.
All this elaborate housing would still be neat, but nonetheless inconsequential, if it didn't match the music it housed, though, and on that score, it succeeds again. A Picturesque View, Ignored consists of a half-hour edit from a live performance at the Powerhouse in Brisbane, Australia that brings together three distinguished electronic performers, the UK's David Toop and Scanner (born Robin Rimbaud), and the Australian trio I/03. The performance is improvised, but it's not entirely knob-twiddling and gradually morphing sawtooth waves, as flutes, lap steel, guitar and keyboards all work their way into the consuming texture of the music.
For those unfamiliar, David Toop (currently a contributing editor to the Wire), has been at this stuff since the 70s, and he's worked with an enormous number of experimental musical personalities over the years, from Brian Eno and Luke Vibert to John Zorn and even Grandmaster Flash. He's not a huge name, but it's hardly his own fault, as he's been involved in all kinds of fascinating music in his time. On the other end of the spectrum, I/03 are relative newcomers to the game, while Scanner is most famous-- or infamous, depending on where you stand-- for his recordings featuring scanned cell phone conversations between unwitting collaborators.
The five musicians make some rather fascinating sounds together, and thankfully avoid the glitch aesthetic that's come to dominate modern electronic music, instead working meticulously to craft glowing, almost tactile soundscapes and fluid, chiming rhythm. Opener "Arius Graeffei" drifts languidly from sharp dissonance to pastel consonance, tethered always by omnipresent field recordings, Heinz Riegler's meditative, minimalist guitar, and strange noises that sound like someone moving small stones against each other in the palm of their hand. For improvised music, it's almost impossibly detailed, drawing in samples of Southeast Asian music and inscrutable conversations, and supplying rhythm so subtly in the background that at times the undulations are noticed more subconsciously than overtly.
"Smelt" brings the rhythm to the fore, smoothing off the edges and immersing it in a bubblebath of processed guitar, digital noise and distant, wordless voices. Really what makes this music so successful is that it follows the laws of physics-- for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. Noise never rises without giving way to calm, but at the same time, the noise never rises or recedes the same way twice, remaining unpredictable and liquid. Elements aren't always introduced in ways you'd expect either-- witness the way Toop utilizes the flute on "Callixene", accenting the sound of air passing into the flute moreso than the notes created by that air.
Ultimately, A Picturesque View, Ignored demands your attention for its full duration, daring you to try and discern the guitar from the programmed sound, the field recording from the live noise. And, of course, as a whole package, it's just too perfect a unit to be denied. As a label, Room40 is carving out what appears to be a fairly distinctive niche, which, these days, is getting harder and harder to do, and as long as their releases remain as consistently engrossing as this one, their singular little gatefolds will always be welcome on my shelf.
