Pimmon's "Assembler" on Fallt

[Sean Cooper <scooper@xxxxxxxx>]

before too much time passes and it disappears from the shelves, let me
urge everyone who is able to pick up a copy of pimmon's latest fallt cd,
"assembler." comparable to the recent works of artists such as oval and
peter rehberg who explore the timbral nuances of distortion within a
distinct musical framework informed by repetition and disjunction, pimmon
sweetens the stew with treated acoustical sources (horns, church organs,
analog drones) and minute sonic details, making for a kind of boisterous,
commitedly digital electracoustic music that is both restless and
balanced, stubborn and generous to the listener. pimmon's tone palette is
perhaps less diverse than oval's, and probably more approachable than
rehberg's, and translates into a kind of obliging minimalism that serves
the music extremely well. nothing is out of place on this record (save,
perhaps, for the two or three power-electronics tracks that i'm forced to
skip over, but that comes down to taste, really ;). all of that said, what 
helps distinguish "assembler" from so many other releases in this broadly
conceived niche -- and that again aligns it with the output of people like
oval, but also taylor deupree, christian fennesz, carsten nicolai,
takemura, hecker, kim cascone, and so forth -- is that it is ultimately
not very comparable at all to anything else. that is, there is a distinct
aesthetic operating in this music that helps give it it's force. and it's
definitely an entire work; pimmon's paul gough recorded "assembler" as a
single whole rather than an assembling of otherwise unrelated tracks
(such as was his other solo album to appear this year, 
"kinetica," released a few months back by kraak), and the focus
contributes a great deal.

there are only three or four must-haves so far on my computer music list
for 2000, and "assembler" is certainly one of them. a consistently
engaging and surprising release. something i'll be spending a good deal
more time with.

sc