Copenhagen-based sound artist Alexander Holm debuts for Stroom with a heavily wonked excursion into uncanny electronics that’ll have great appeal for anyone with a more than passing interest in OPN, Robert Ashley, Christian Mirande++. Dial/Head Stroll speaks clearly to Holm’s long-standing position in the Danish underground via his associations with the avidly avant-minded Sensorisk Verden label, confidently weaving a disorientating tapestry of spoken word vignettes, warped electronics and electro-acoustic digressions that suggest impossible liminal spaces ala the creepypasta of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms. Where are we in the world? Where are we in time? Nothing is especially clear within the universe of Dial/Head Stroll, and therein lies its pleasures, confused and confusing, slightly unnerving but, as with Clark in the aforementioned Backrooms, strangely addicting, drawing you back in over repeated listens into it’s hard to navigate environs, all sight lines slightly out of whack. Key to this experience is the 10-minute long centre piece, ‘Pilot’, a sequence of undulating electronics and splutters that fade in and out of focus as a voiceover narrates a barely comprehensible set of instructions that unite in some spooky union of Mirande’s Beautiful One Day, Perfect the Next and ‘I Am Sitting In A Room’ by Alvin Lucier. Perhaps tricky to parse on first listen, but over time, a genuinely mesmerising set of compositions that I presume it’ll take a while to fully process.
FFO: Alvin Lucier, Oneothrix Point Never, Christian Mirande, Robert Ashley
