Tuned Darker

Description

'The light has changed; middle C is tuned darker now'

This line, taken from Louise Gluck's poem October (2004), is the guiding concept for Australian new music ensemble Decibel's third LP, Tuned Darker, originally released in 2015. The album presents the group's creative vision at its most cohesive: collecting works composed by ensemble members that explore changing shades of mood, tone, and aesthetics that evoke a sense of darkness, while showcasing Decibel's unique blend of classical music experimentation with noise, sound art, and song-like sensibilities. Originally published on the now defunct West Australian Listen|Hear label, this re-release by Huddersfield Contemporary Records expands on the original exactly ten years later, inviting the listener to revisit these shadowy, uncanny soundscapes, where the act of listening is a paradoxically illuminating experience.

The opening track, Cat Hope's The Lowest Drawer, crafts a sonic shadow play, with each instrument descending into a space of acoustic resonance, interwoven with electronic tones. Weighty low frequencies are not simply heard but felt, experienced as pressure, mass, and a darkening of the auditory field, shaping a slow yet graceful unfolding. Stuart James' n dimension refers to the 'dark' quantity of higher abstractions of space beyond three-dimensions, evoking this through slow drumming and phasing effects between polyrhythmic pulses, spatialised mixing, and discordant sustained tones. The end result is the evocation of unique sonic shapes that play out fluidly and non-linearly to hypnotic effect. Meanwhile, Lindsay Vickery's expansive song cycle Night Fragments draws on the surrealist technique of 'sleep-writing', pairing impressionistic verse, sung by guest vocalist Caitlin Cassidy, with counter-melodic and counter-rhythmic musical choices that drive the fractured dream narrative, playing with the absurd and banal through displacement and estrangement of the familiar.

A new addition for this HCR re-release of Tuned Darker is Percipience: After Kaul. Composed by Louise Devenish and Stuart James, this new addition provides the album with an additional shade of darkness. Devenish's triangle, already an instrument with a rich harmonic spectrum, becomes an extended conglomerate, acoustically amplified and spatialised through James' electronic processing. The result is a densely textured wash of multi-pitched chimes, haunting and ineffable, electronically modified to transpose the sound into lower, more brooding registers, vertically extending not only the instrument's range but also the depth of the darkness covered by the original release.