Record Collector (UK)

A study in sound an silence.

Marc Weidenbaum’s sleevenotes capture the essence of this fine collection of compositions by New York sound sculptor Kenneth Kirschner:
“The music heard on this album is, light the night sky, a broad and dark space inhabited by dispersed and luminous materials. And, as in the night sky, there are patterns.”

Kirschner is predomiantly interested in the way sound surfaces from silence, encouraging listeners to engage with tonal qualities and textures as notes materilise from, and plunge back into, absence. So, “October 19, 2006” and “September 11, 1996” take sequences of synthesized waves, shimmering like Tibetan bowls, and bury them under veiled vaccums of nothingness, while “March 16, 2006” is a monumental Feldman-esque exercise in piano and pause display. Like William Baskski’s Disintegration Loops series, this music is as much about the power of repetition and duration as it is about the force of silence.

Only on the more recent “June 10, 2008” does Kirschner break from this mod; a glistening organ based über-drone whose transcendental properties place it alongside the works of such notables as Pauline Oliveros, Phill Niblock and Eliane Radigue. – Spencer Grady