Carillon sans timbre ni marteau Vol1
After A River Flowing Home To The Sea LP released on Bedouin Records in 2020, Maze & Lindholm opens a new series of albums exploring compositional processes focused on cyclical time. Each volume of the new series will be a unique composition that can be listened to as a loop, of variable duration (up to 60 minutes). Radical meditative music on the borders of contemporary ambient, this first volume recorded in France in a renovated watermill, offers a 62-minute composition created mainly with an old music box.
« Maze & Lindholm are based in Brussels but traveled to rural northern France to make Carillon sans timbre ni marteau at an old mill. The album is presented as the first volume in a series that will explore “compositional processes focused on cyclical time,” an apt temporality given their agrarian surroundings. Although it is difficult to discern what if any acoustic effect the actual setting provides, the duo take the auditory equivalent of a magnifying glass to the mechanism of a music box. Notes struck by tiny tines are looped, dubbed, and stretched into ambient eternity, as is every crank of the mechanism and creak of the box in which it is housed. As the tuned teeth cause the pins to reverberate, chimes ramify as sprinklings of fairy dust and triumphant flourishes, while others blare like warning bells or throw off tiny flares of distortion. The sound is surely enhanced by additional close-up electronic magic, as this take on “the borders of contemporary ambient” renders the physical reality of the source intermittently abstract. The air around it billows out, inhales back in.
As unlikely as it may seem given the cyclical nature of clockwork, there is drama and narrative progression. Somewhat perversely for a lullaby machine, the album takes on a somewhat dark cast as it winds toward an end. Though this can of course be negated by simply starting over, as Maze & Lindholm suggest you listen to Carillon sans timbre ni marteau on repeat. » A Text by Stephen Fruitman for Avant Music News
The music box is very much alive in this massive amplification, recording every movement of the box, all the mechanics, and so on, becoming an integral element of the music. That certainly adds to the vibrant aspect of the music. (Vital Weekly)
A meditation on the cyclical nature of time (A closer Listen)
Format: CD & DigitalRelease date: Feb15 2023
Derived from the composition and produced by Totalism, the performance revolves around 32 rotating music box movements blending sound and visuals. Each is individually prepared to break down and recompose original melodies in fragmentary and offbeat ways. With optical prisms arranged above each, the device creates colorful shapes projected all around, providing real-time visualization of sound manipulations.