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CD
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WHITEBOX 006CD
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Arkhonia is one-half of a UK collaborative project under the name of jz-arkh, and it is, indeed, a peculiar animal. It is a deep, deep listening experience which plunges the listener further into states of subconscious unrest -- time slows down or stops, as the listener slowly slips into a narcoleptic state through the slow decline into computer noise, or sound events which unfold with no discernable pattern or meaning. But rather than offering a monotonous serial drone, these tracks create an overall landscape, alternately dank and warm to the point of humidity, and cold, stark and sparse, all eventually dissipating into nothingness as the album closes, reprising the pulses and washes of its opening. This is a collection of drone-based, slow-moving progressions, all realized without the use of any live instrumentation, or any trained musical ear. Small fragments of sound have been stretched, edited, filtered, reduced and manipulated to create an often barren and solitary sonic landscape. The source materials have been either expanded from a limited input, broken down and transformed into something entirely distinct from its origin, or transmuted into a bold and dark shadow of its former self -- all collated into one seamless sequence. These tracks have been very consciously constructed, with edits and segments extracted from outputted "drift studies" (with a knowing nod to both La Monte Young and Brian Eno) that often run for an hour or so, and then dissected for key musical components. These explorations focus on ideas of musical "events and non-events"; subdued harmonic monotones and stasis contrasting with huge dynamic surges of processed tones -- insistent, at times bordering on the subsonic, and tonally identifiable as Arkhonia's distinctly digital sound signature.
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