M A S & Travis McAlister – The Fade Out Room [tube243]
Ambient & Experimental, Electro-Acoustic, Instrumental, Minimal // By: Daniel // 27/01/2012 // No Comments
Anyone who has spent any time exploring the world of netaudio will quickly realise just how much music that can be loosely termed ‘ambient’ exists out there; so much in fact that it’s hard to find the really good stuff amongst the masses of generic soundscapes and atmospheric synth doodlings. Makram Abu-Shakra and Travis McAlister’s ‘The Fade Out Room’, the latest release from the ever-excellent Test Tube netlabel, stands out from the pack by embracing a range of sounds and sonic expressions quite different from most of their peers.
This is a haunting, disorientating collaboration crafted over three years, that demonstrates the pair’s shared history in improvisation and minimalist experimentation. The album achieves that rare feat of sounding like it was recorded almost by accident; it’s far too weird to be described as background music, but it does carry an edge of mystery, as if it is telling only part of a story. The opening track ‘The Room Lies Still During Twilight’ is one of the most unsettling pieces of music I’ve heard all year – an off-key, old-fashioned organ plays in the distance, somewhere behind a wall of static and crackles, abruptly disappearing into silence every 30 seconds or so before resuming its mournful refrain.
The organ returns in ‘From The End Of The Hallway’, sounding like something you might hear in a 1930s music hall in some horrific Lovecraftian alternate reality. That track is about as melodic as the album gets – pieces such as ‘Clogstone Blue’ and ‘The Children And The Sleeping Saint’ are uncomfortable mixes of echoes, found sounds and feedback. The standout track is ‘Sad Song For Isis’, which drags a evil, vibrating saw sound across nearly 10 nightmarish minutes, a drunken, fractured hip-hop beat fading in and out of the murk.
Test Tube have maintained a consistently impressive output for over six years now, and ‘The Fade-out Room’ is one of their strongest releases for some time. The description on the Test Tube website suggests that this is a one-off collaboration from Abu-Shakra and McAlister – a shame if so, as this album shows that the pair have a rare musical chemistry. But either way, it’s a potent, challenging listen; the soundtrack to a bad dream perhaps, but great music.
MAS & Travis McAlister – The Room Lies Still During Twilight
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