THING

With this ninth edition, attenuation circuit continues its series of four-way split albums called THING. The aim is to provide a medium for exchange and presentation of a great variety of artists. As each artist spreads the copies to their network, listeners also get to know the other artists featured on the same disc. The title references the fact that the CDs are physical objects – things! – but also refers to the 'thing' or 'ding' in old Norse and other Germanic languages, which designates the place of a popular assembly or the assembly itself and thus alludes to the 'meeting-place' character of the albums on (or around) which the four artists and their audiences meet, if only virtually.

This THING brings together artists from Greece (Substak), Germany (Der Domestizierte Mensch), and the U.S. (Thomas Bey William Bailey and Jo Bled). Dominated by electronically generated sounds, the tracks on this album also occasionally feature acoustic percussion sounds. And indeed the exploration of rhythms, be they electronic or acoustic, is the thread that binds the four pieces on this album together. Not rhythm in the sense of straight beats that make for danceable ‚tracks‘, but slanted, edgy rhythms which constantly change their pace and direction. Rhythms that do not follow a musical map and do not even draw one, but rather rhythms that create new musical landscapes as they go along, leaving it to the listeners to cartograph this newly emerging topography with their ears.

File under: experimental, electronic