Arc’s “Monument 36" is a Deep Listener’s delight, braiding the binaural pulses of low hertz drones with plodding, electro-acoustic bows & whistles, thus revealing an unending sunrise that creeps across unindustrialized swaths of land at a patiently relentless pace.
The parsing out of which sources used were created organically straight-to-tape, were captured and heavily treated (and/or occasionally looped/augmented), and which ones were products of choirs of oscillators is no easy task…and I suppose it really doesn’t matter.
This tape bridges the gap between meditative visionaries like Eleh and Éliane Radigue, adopting their careful, catatonic narrative-revelations in spirit, but sprinkling in the more dynamic approach of interdisciplinary sound cultivation* and, perhaps a liiiii’l extra pep, here & there. Relatively speaking, by the time a bowed cymbal makes its presence discernible, it comes off heavy as a stoney riff.
Spread uninterrupted across four distinct movements (program repeats on side B), Monument 36 is an electroacoustic-drone lover’s dream!
and/or
— Jacob An Kittenplan
*ie: organic v. synthesized
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