Enclosures 2011–2016
(Pica Disk - PICA044) 5xCD $30.00 (Out-of-stock)
Remastered reissue of limited edition CDRs self-released on Deepskin Conceptual Mindmusic. Includes Transistor Rhythms (2011), Proportions Of The Skull (2012), Echo Dot (2014), EndClosures (2015), and Differential Hemispheres (2016). With booklet of Clint Williams's surrealist drawings and science fiction themed artwork, plus liner notes by collaborator Bruce Russell.
inSec
(Siltbreeze) LP $17.00
Lost in the label’s murky somewheresville since it was recorded in 2013, this ambient masterpiece brings to mind a John Carpenter soundtrack performed by The Hub. Clinton Williams’s infectious and corrupting sounds synthesize new lifeforms in your brain’s enzymes. If you specialize in a niche too much, you are prey to predators outside, but Omit never goes for low-hanging fruit and isn’t simulating anything. Xenobiological effects aside, inSec constructs your sentiment through timbral concepts that repeat and shift with minimal reference to harmony, melody, key, or mode. Streams jump and skitter, knitting tightly high and low in a dense rattling driven to the long and most plaintive tones among the countless gizmos (that’s including you, but not “you”). This one is for big fans of Anode/Cathode, Ikue Mori, Papa Srapa, Fronte Violeta, and Insignia refrigerators.
Interceptor
(Helen Scarsdale - HMS012) 2xCD $14.25 (Out-of-stock)
New Zealand electronic musician Clinton Williams’s home-spun constructs detour from the sculpted grit and mottled distortion in the work of his countrymen and -women. His opus Quad 3xCD (Corpus Hermeticum, 1998) makes palpable the artist’s contentious argument with his own unwieldy mousetrap of tape-loops, modular electronics, effects pedals, drum machines, and the creaking sounds of his house. Interceptor is the result of an experiment with a portable studio outside his longtime home of Blenheim. With two suitcases of drum machines, effects, and analog synths, Williams recalls being “pissed off with myself wasting time recording this stuff when I was trying to find a job.” His frustrations stripped away much of the grandiose sweeps of ambience and shadow, leaving behind a life-support system grid of overlapping, phase-shifted blip and click. An undertow of hypnotic tonalities pulls those rhythms toward a crepuscular gloom. Williams has always been at odds with his own work, yet his self-doubt continues to deliver magnificent albums which thrive in a symbiotic struggle with mechanical disintegration.
Rejector
(Anomalous) Used CD $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
Admired by Prog Archives for its “evocative, spectral soundscapes full of drones textures, micro-accidents and events,” this is “a dark, glacial and gorgeous listen.” Real-time progressive electronic sounds in the tradition of ’70s Berlin underground. Sealed
Tracer
(Helen Scarsdale) CD $13.50 (Out-of-stock)
As with the previous works by obsessive electronic composer Clinton Williams, Tracer is an antiquated behemoth, constructed from analogue synthesizers, primitive drum machines, homespun electronics, and numerous effects pedals. Simple wooden rhythms trot, trudge, and even glide along taut metric grids hot-wired with bursts of mechanical splutter and the occasional creak from Pierre Henry’s wooden door. An occasionally menacing, but more often melancholy, orchestration of synthetic tones ripple, flex, and dissolve across the uniform structuralism, creating an ecstatic paranoia rarely heard with such splendor, rigor, and sublime blackness. If sonic references are required, then the Klaus Schulze masterpiece Cyborg is close.