With this new project, Radia, Long Beach, CA sound artist Glenn Bach builds quiet soundscapes from guitar feedback and field recordings captured at various state parks in California and Wisconsin. By combining the unpredictable aspect of analog signal with the mostly natural sounds of protected landscapes, he examines the blurred boundaries of geography, place and memory.

The album is a quiet masterpiece of minimalism, its slow guitar tones feeding off the subtle location recordings which underpin the entirety of the release. Radia is a set of recordings that reveals something new, in miniature, with each successive listen.

Catalogue number: DU08

REVIEWS:

From Vital Weekly 821 (28 February 2012):
Although the name sounded familiar, I may not have heard of Glenn Bach before. He leads the improvising ensemble Double Blind ('a vehicle for collaborative soundscapes) and Intense Situations Of Peril (all electronics ensemble) and has worked with John Kannenberg on 'Two Cities', 'an audio-visual meditation on ambulatory experiences of place'. Besides that he has a net-label MPRNTBL, about field recordings, lowercase, analog noise and collaborative soundscapes. This solo release uses guitar feedback and field recordings captured in various state parks in California and Wisconsin. This is quiet music, sometimes almost below the threshold of hearing, but it sounds great. Lowercase is a term we don't hear that much anymore, but it certainly applies to this music. Whatever field recordings he has captured (at some instances I recognized the sound of water and birds), or whatever processes he applied to them, they sound like blurry static pieces of hiss like sounds, in which he places his sparse guitar sounds. There is a lot of space in the music - not in a cosmic sense of the word, but in the sparseness of the sounds used to create this music. This is not the kind of music you put on for 'fun', or as 'background'. This music requires active listening and without such concentrated effort it rather fails to impress the listener. It might be over before you know something had started. That is, I think, a great quality. (FdW)
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