The idea of a sextet, y’know … a musical group with six members, isn’t anything too unusual, That is, until you venture into the world of new improvised, electro-acoustic, noisy, post-electronic (whatever) music. Here, the small unit is the dominant format – soloists, duos, maybe three-piece. Six is something special. Anyone familiar with the extensive discographies of these gents: Tim Coster, Richard Francis, Rosy Parlane, Mark Sadgrove, Clinton Watkins and Paul Winstanley will find anticipation of this mega-ensemble (convened by Richard last year) well-rewarded.
Reduced to its simplest form, Into Tone is a two-part improvisation, a bit over 30 minutes long. Conventional instrumental sources occur more as ghostings than fully-fledged voices– the tremble of a guitar, buried soundings from an electric bass. The core instrumentality is all the other stuff: field recordings, computers, digital feedback – you could say “marginal audio”, reconstituted into affecting music of patient, slow thrills.

This sort of trawler aesthetic, layered and snail-paced, is now so common in the experimental scene that it’s looking like becoming the new lounge music for enlightened ears. But a well-trodden path can still a lovely and memorable journey make, and this is the case here. There are some cool transitions: like the brittle texture that heralds the entry of a dominant speaker-churning (but far from unpleasant) vascular hum. The audio tableaux gradually sinks into your perception, suggestive but very alien. Percussive textures are prominent but not dominant – no mean feat.
What happens next? A bunch of electro players can wind up on auto pilot, lead into a corner by each others sounds, especially once more sustained layers settle in. But in another transient high point, the underlying retinal drone shifts intensity and heads, as the title suggests: into tone. We might have ended up in the same ball park as Surface of the Earth/K-Group, but there’s a less monolithic impression. Each individual part has a nice degree of activity and evolution, and instead of a drifting zone-out there’s a stealthy return to the earlier murky intensity, before concluding with a brief spell of fresh-audio-air.

I was fortunate to watch this music being played, at last year’s Version Festival and it’s been a real pleasure to revisit it. At the time I wasn’t entirely won over by the concert, which says something about how I experienced seeing this music being made. What I took, as an audience member, for tentativeness and hesitancy on the part of the players now seems on the evidence of the CD to have been admirable restraint and caution. Maybe I should just shut my eyes in future….

John Kennedy