On my first exposure to the work now under review, I found myself conceiving of what I heard in terms of a huge contrast in atmosphere with the two previous outing unleashed by Ubeboet this year: his ‘Lux Eterna’ contribution to the Extract compilation, and the Spectra release on Twenty Hertz. Where the latter works seemed to almost explicitly hark back to the tradition of medieval spiritual music, this release under review seems rather more explicitly propelled by the “death-drive” of 2006’s Duae (with Pablo Reche).
A strangely eventless happening - time itself becoming something of a non-event whilst listening to this release - wholly lacking in any evident narrative structure or graspable sonic texture; whilst on the other hand this could just as well be the sonification of one absolutely random, absolutely meaningful event, granulated and spatio-temporally reconstructed – perhaps one single heartbeat (or a dying breath) as heard through a 4-d stethoscope.
Thus lacking just about any figurativity whatsoever, this new work by Ubeboet leaves much to be imagined. Only tangentially rustled by the sonic contents of this release, the sensorium is massaged by psychic vibrations spanning geological and cultural strata. The resultant experience is directly related to the drama of time and eternity, of life and death, of being and not being, of human and inhuman, of organic and inorganic, of spirit and matter. There is a pulse, an air, a current, a stream which is magnified to mythical proportions wherein stasis and kinesis, the roaring ocean and industrial bustle become equivalent events.
Notwithstanding the difference in ‘atmosphere’ with his two previous outings, there is a sense in which this work can be seen as standing in line with these recent works: this work, in contrast to Ubeboet's earlier work, can be unequivocally deemed an ambient piece. Excavated of any concrete reference whatsoever, the fundamentally undefinite is all that remains; and the mastery of Ubeboet is to have actually given form to that undefinitivity. |
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