Foxy Digitalis : Unknow
If you had to slap a label on Australian sound artist Philip Sulidae’s “Unknow” maybe minimal ambient drone would work. This 3’’ CDr makes for elusive quarry; not so much dodging attempts at understanding as disallowing projected thoughts any substantial surface for interaction . . Opener “3300ff.3399cc.003399” is like smoke displayed in rays of light or a recording of the shadows cast by sound. Next is “000099.0066cc.66ccff,” totally nebulous like the first track but sharper at its edges. At six minutes, closer “0000cc.ccccff.99cccc” is the longest and track and also the fullest. It has hints of submerged oscillations and some subtle tonal variances that prove interesting.
I’m not sure if I’m taking it as the composer intended, but, to me, this brief album is an attempt to display emptiness via sound. Aside from a few exceptions, working in total silence prevents the listener from knowing to listen. Paradoxically, there needs to be enough substance to show what isn’t there. This short record treads liminal waters somewhere at either the very beginning or end of sound. With only a few subdued minutes of listening I’m not sure which. 7/10
- Mike Pursley
Tokafi : The Blacken Solver and Unknow
With its sensually simmering and subtly shimmering chord sequences, The Blacken Solver opens with two nocturnal soundscapes somewhere between dream and delirium. As harmonies contract and expand in cycles of tension and relaxation, Sulidae counterpoints their elegiac yearning with a dense fog of cool crackle. By juxtaposing acoustic events both very near and extremely far away and applying different degrees of reverb, the result is an unreal conglomerate that feels both perfectly tranquil and unsettlingly nervous – this is high-tension music at the border of perception. Closer “Baralku”, on the other hand, has a distinct touch of early Krautrock to it: Thick, majestically resonant Organ-clusters are hovering mid-air in monolithic splendour, swelling and ebbing away in brutish elegance. Towards the end, gnawing and chewing noises evoke a fairytale-like sequence, before leading into a prolonged coda and, ulitmately, silence.
At slightly under twenty minutes’ length, The Black Solver still appears almost epic compared to the mere quarter of an hour of Unknow. And yet, it is probably this release which sums up Sulidae’s concepts about composition best. The idea of fore and background segueing into each other is explored even more radically here and rather than using hypnotic repetition as a driving force, he places his motives for no longer than a few second and then carefully observes their echoes as they gently ripple through subsequent waves of sound and noise. On “3300ff.3399cc.003399″, a quietly anthemic theme rises from a busy street scene only to quickly disappear again. Its reverberations, though, can be felt until the end of the piece, influencing the course of the music until the last note has died down. It is a recurring motive in the other tracks as well: cause and effect are of central importance here, their typical relations appearing confused and contorted: Seemingly small events can turn out to have seminal influence, while outwardly essential indications simply disappear.
- Tobias Fischer
Wonderful Wooden Reasons : The Blacken Solver and Unknow
Two mini sets of cosmic isolationist tone and drone from this Australian musician whose music links lonely tones with a subtly derelict post-industrial melancholy.
Unknow’s three tracks are an absolute joy. They conjure images of loss and abandonment that leave one feeling distinctly uneasy.
The Blacken Solver contrary to what it’s title would lead you to believe is the more open and psychedelic of the two. Here he has sacrificed much of the cloying atmospherics and replaced them with a more expansive and expressive palette that makes wider use of the sounds available to him.
- Ian Holloway
Sonomu : The Blacken Solver and Unknow
Australian sound artist Philip Sulidae issues two small white slabs of dark, dense experimental ambient on twin, three-inch CDRs, each lovingly slid into black-on-grey, flocked paper sleeves. His chief means are field recordings, organ, and “synthesis”.
The Blacken Solver is gloomy, beautiful, fidgeting uncomfortably as it waits for its luck to change. The second of two untitled tracks crackles and rumbles more deeply in a space with the acoustics of an aluminium air shaft. The closing eight-minute track “Baralku” looms and searches, gnawing through the rubble and the gravel. A very tactile track.
On its companion volume, “Unknow”, Sulidae claims to find “light among the pervasive haze”, and indeed, the sum of the whole seems an attempt to move upward, like a shoot straining at the soil and longing for the sun.
- Stephen Fruitman
Vital Weekly : The Blacken Solver and Unknow
Two 3″ CDR releases, nicely packed in a sort of hard fabric cover by someone of whom I never heard, Philip Sulidae. He is from Australia. Both releases have three tracks. ‘The Blacken Solver’ has three tracks of great ambient drone quality. They are created with field recordings, organ and synthesis. Highly drone based of course, but with a bit of noise to it, especially in ‘Baralku’, it borders almost on the edge of distortion, but it doesn’t. Slow moving music, shady dark textures, deep atmospherics. That kind of thing.
For ‘Unknow’ it says ‘constructed from samples, keys and synthesis’, and also has three tracks (though in total a few minutes shorter), and its hard to point out the finer differences between both releases. They are there, ‘Unknow’ seems a bit more reduced in approach I think, but then its not difficult to hear that they were recorded by the same person. Good fine ambient music with a touch of dark drones woven neatly into this. Nothing new in that area, but done with utmost care and precision. Nice covers too.
- Frans De Waard
Loop : The Blacken Solver
This is the third release of Sydney based sound artist Philip Sulidae who works into ambient composition along with field recordings, software design sound and analogue keyboards. On “The Blacken Solver” thick layers of crackle sounds, noise and cosmic dust interweave in three extended tracks, creating disturbing atmospheres that travel through dark black holes.
The trip is captivating and the listener transports itself in long passages of soundscapes and kaleidoscope images.
- Guillermo Escudero
Loop : Unknow
“Unknow” is a 3″CD-R that consists in three tracks of 15 minutes long and it is wrapped in a black velvet case. Sulidae works in different layers of field recordings, keyboards and processing creating vast drone sections. The whistling sound squelch deep into dark and staggering atmospheres, and glitches and hiss sprinkled over noise textures.
- Guillermo Escudero
noCo_mment : Southwest
Au delà du simple déplacement, et peut-être d’un “exotisme” aussi subjectif que suranné, “southwest” est une réalisation très intriguante. Voici l’une de ces nouvelles approches où dominent largement des impressions, elles-aussi, intellectuellement stimulantes et novatrices. Ainsi, fort de la collaboration active de recording fields issus d’expériences géographiques, Philip Sulidae nous offre une belle combinaison atmosphérique de ces extractions environnementales. Si le ton général semble sombre, celà est, somme toute, assez naturel car il y a assez peu de lumière sous la surface des choses. creusons!
- Thierry Massard
