Tape Loop Orchestra: Liminal Lungs LP

Stunning choral smoke from the ever wonderful Tape Loop Orchestra, here shedding the blissed drone energies of his best known material in favour of a more lucid expression of ideas constructed almost entirely from the human voice and bass pulses. If you were into that amazing Antonina Nowacka album earlier this year, or indeed Kara-Lis Coverdale’s peerless sacred variations, this one comes highly recommended. ‘Liminal Lungs’ finds Andrew Hargreaves shedding his pedals and effects in favour of a more sober take on fizzing bliss, using a palette of sung notes re-shaped into a virtual choir and fed almost imperceptibly thru his tape loop matrix. In the process, he offers a study in the semiotics of emotion; stripping back to a ghostly chorale where the composer is present but elusive, conducting his voices in an imaginary space that comes to life thru a kind of compositional alchemy. The results call to mind aspects of Akira Rabelais’ work with processed sound echoes as much as Luc Ferrari’s concrète abstractions or Alvin Lucier’s room recordings, ushering and inhabiting the liminal space of the title with an exceedingly subtle grasp of mysteriousness as the work’s spatial qualities come into play. As it goes on, Hargreaves creates a growing sense of displacement from the original recordings with bass pulses that reverberate the synthesised space, probing the grey area between perception and reality, conjuring an event the listener can’t be sure ever really took place.