MACHINEFABRIEK - dauw

(CD, Dekorder)

Almost anybody could tell you that there are three basic aggregates of material in the physical world: liquid, gas and solid material. Only a few people can tell you that there are some more, like solid material being divided in crystalic and anamorphous materials. Philosophically inclined people will start to ramble about the fascination that the transcending of material from one status to another has to them and the grey areas where parts of the material are here and other parts are there and about the way these changes take place. (Many philosophers, especially of the modern kind, have used these as metaphors, usually not in physical correct terms, but anyway.) Never up to now have I read about material that is in two different aggregates at the same time. And I don’t mean partly frozen and partly liquid as in currently melting. I mean ephemeral like a gas and at the same time solid like the ground I stand on. And I mean the music Ruytger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek has produced for this album. And the main question is: has chaos theory ever sounded so fine?

“Dauw” is one of the rare full length releases of Machinefabriek amidst an uncountable mass of small and smaller format releases, remixes and collaborations. Around only since 2004 the output has grown out of bounds quickly, though the music is rooted in its core vision all times. Based on solid sounds from all sorts of string instruments and percussions, with the help of intricate noises both from analogue as well as electronic sources, he builds long winding, slowly evolving, fascinating tracks that evolve with time. Sometimes they are drones resting the listener’s pulse and lowering vital activity of the body to a mere breathing-status. At other times they show percussive randomness and eerie sounds like mid eighties Horror movie soundtracks, only sparser, less economic and more focused on emotional effect. Zuydervelt does not stay away from adding glitches and error noises (“Engineer”) if he want so, only to add the unaltered and undistorted picking of a guitar in the next moment as on the title track “Dauw” which ends on an angelic choir singing simple lines of notes in the background. In contrast “singel” starts with nothing but soft, lowdown static noise and takes almost two minutes before the first set of other sounds – mongolic prayer bowls – set in. (This last track, “singel”, takes up almost half of the length of the whole album. The other four tracks are somewhere between three and seven minutes.)

Often have I wondered what the fascination of music like this is to me. Music that constantly wanders at the fringes of the definition of what music actually is, that makes the meaning of what is noise and what is harmony slowly shift or disappear (only to come up at other places). The slowly drifting dynamic of these tracks has the same endless quality that watching the ocean ebb and flow has, or watching a loved one sleep. Despite all the troubles and distractions that lurk at the bottom of these images (or just right below the surface), the evil undertow of the shoreline and of relationships with other people, the most basic, bottom line pulse remains the same throughout all of creation. So, a divine or metaphysical explanation for the phenomena that arise at the grey areas of clear physical definition? Maybe yes. The transcendental atmosphere created by “Dauw” certainly makes hard facts dissolve and turns emotional aspects into static truths. And if one truth remains then it may be that falling asleep to “Dauw” will give you a headfull of interesting ideas to ponder.

www.dekorder.com
09/2008