Remarkably engaging glitch-ambience from hyper-prolific San Francisco based sound artist Billy Gomberg, which has every right to be considered in the same breath as the likes of genre greats Oval, Jan Jelinek, Fennesz and so forth. Gomberg has been at this particular cliff-face for close to two decades now, and has aligned with a number of credible labels along the way, but Capacity has to surely register as a new high point. Built from a number of locational recordings, there’s a very ‘in nature’ feel to Capacity, that sense of drifting winds, running waters and the flow of people and things within and amongst which gets to the heart of what makes glitch such an appealing construction - at its best, the loops of stutters, feedback, noise and decay offer a vivid conveyance of our human place within the world at that interface where the natural and the artificial meet. It’s hard to place much of these sounds, but that’s besides the point, for it’s what they impress that matters. Suffused with a kind of lingering pathos, I found much of these 35 minutes to be unexpectedly emotional, almost elegiac at times in ways that reminded me, again unexpectedly, of Hana Stretton’s tiarn and its meditations on ‘ecological trauma’. The world is literally falling away before our eyes and in its blossoming and then disintegrating reverberations, Capacity seems to capture that experience perfectly. A genuine out-of-nowhere year contender for sure.
FFO: Oval, Jan Jelinek, Fennesz, Ulla, Rafael Toral, Hana Stretton
