Austere - Pulse
Artist: Austere
Title: Pulse
Label: Hypnos Secret Sounds
2007.
Track listing:
Pulse is a single track, 53 minutes long.
MP3 sample clips: This is the way Pulse sounds
near the beginning,
near the middle, and
near the end.
Hypnos Online Store listing
Reviews
"This release from 2006 offers 53 minutes of extreme minimalism. Ephemeral tonalities gather, thickening the air with the illusion of density. In actuality, the ambience is extreme and understated. Misty pulsations surround the listener, wafting delicately along the auditory canals. The intent is sedation, but not the somnambulant kind. This music is encoded with alpha waves along with subtle bi-aural panning, producing a mood of relaxed concentration intended to facilitate creative activity in the brain. The structure seems unchanging, but auxiliary textures sneak in over time, craftily altering the flow. Deeper tones rise to slowly overwhelm the nucleus drone, only to be supplanted by other rarefied tones. The illusion of immobility is quite deceptive. Comprising a single long track, this music possesses a loving dedication to undisturbed serenity. The stimulation achieved by this tuneage could well go unnoticed unless the audience engages in cognition."
--Reviewed by Matt Howarth, Sonic Curiosity, www.soniccuriosity.com
.
"There’s essentially no way to listen to the duo Austere’s new CD, Pulse, and be able to comment cogently on the entire thing. Because at a point somewhere around the 15- to 25-minute mark, your brain simply surrenders, having been lulled and massaged into complete relaxation, and just starts interpreting the sounds as a direct order to go into a deep theta state and stay there. It will, however, retain the memory of warm, droning synth pads of misleading simplicity that waft easily and steadily onward, never in a hurry to do anything but not hurry; eon-long chords convincingly demonstrating how easy it is to simply be, only ever changing slightly, and then just to become more definitively what they had been in the first place—gentle and relaxing. Pulse is ideal background music and perfect for sleep-listening. Pleasant dreams."
--Reviewed by John @ Hypnogogue
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"Last in a series of three Austere works applying ambient principles to minimalist practice (and vice versa), Pulse follows 1998’s Convergence and 2004’s Eco. This enigmatic pair are psychoactive musical practitioners, deploying a processing technique referred to as “Brainwave Encoding”: barely perceptible binaural panning generates spatial sound characteristics to enhance brainwaves and foster certain “mind states”. A still vital element in Reichian minimalism’s legacy—the phase shift technique—is also featured here: recurring identical motifs initially run in parallel, imperceptible shifts slowly taking them out of sync with each other, then back in again. The result is a long format piece whose surface is one of apparent statis, gradually revealing a longitudinally evolving deeper structure. Recall Reich’s enduring maxim: “to facilitate closely detailed listening a musical process should happen extremely gradually.” So much for minimalism. As for ambient principles, Pulse’s stated function of promoting a state of relaxed concentration or disposition toward creative activity bears strong echoes of Neroli (subtitled Thinking Music, remember). And further appeals are made in accompanying commentary to established Enovian ambient principles of music as environmental tint - as psychoactive prosthetic. Austere profess to being inspired by Coil, Eno, SotL, and Robert Rich, and there is substance to their profession. Drones are wafted out into soft ambient clouds of minimal tonal vapor, initially interspersed with rests, then becoming denser and more overlapping as the phase-shifting kicks in, with the faint suggestion of a metallic echo halo constantly reconfiguring itself. With so little figure to grab onto, all being ground and field, the listener may range freely, dipping in and out with attentivity off the leash. Such spaces being all about the same tonemass swelling up and falling, infinitely recurring with minimal variativity, it’s important that the warp and weft of texture is sufficently beguiling, and Austere, while living up to their no-frills nomenclature, demonstrate themselves to be well-versed in the subtleties of these timbral dark arts."
--Alan Lockett, e/i Magazine