Sachiko M: Sounds From M [Party Perfect!!!]. The latest two Party Perfect releases return to their abrasive and bloody-minded roots. I heard Sachiko M play live in Melbourne back in (checks sleeve notes for this album) 2001? Gosh. She had a sampler with nothing in the memory and somehow got the high-pitched sine wave that emerged from it to move about a bit, after a fashion. Since then, I have never actively kept tabs on her career but I had always hoped that she was still doing more or less the same thing, somehow. It is therefore a pleasure to say that Sounds From M proves the last twenty-five years have neither softened nor diluted her end-point aesthetic. The piece, recorded one day in 2024, falls into seven nested movements of precisely five minutes each, forming a kind of palindrome. A high-pitched sine wave pierces the air, ducking and diving depending on where your head is in relation to your speakers. Pulses of digital switching create pops and crackles at various frequencies; the sine wave returns, but higher pitched and out of phase, creating dead spots in your room. In the central section the sine wave pushes upwards against my threshhold of audibility, becoming frangible with more pulsing. Then it recapitulates on each action in reverse. Digital pops aside, it’s all mastered at a very low level. There’s a level of commitment here, beyond experimentation, to create sonic objects that evoke a physical presence while seeking an absolute minimum of texture and colour.
Luciano Maggiore: tordo + uah + cick [Party Perfect!!!]. It’s Luciano Maggiore, so as is the custom I must admit I have no idea what is going on. This time, however, he is unwilling to help me, other than to say he composed and performed this piece a small number of times around Europe in 2024. I think there’s a sampler invovled here too, maybe with CD players, Walkmans, stuff like that. Track 1 was recorded live in London and has lots of low-level twittering and the occasional chirp on a farily regular basis. It goes for over half an hour so you know he’s committed and you’ll have to start paying attention sooner or later, but what that attention will get you is something never really answered. He’s confronting you but giving you the freedom to be unaffected by it; a rare commodity in modern art, to accommodate indifference. Maggiore makes insistent but neutral sounds, refuses to elaborate, then on track 2 goes and does it all over again in Berlin. Hilariously, the two sample extracts on the Bandcamp page are each thirty seconds long, because really anything more is superfluous. You can also get it on cassette, so that the low-level twittering is submerged in hiss.
