Petersonic: Touch#6
Nisan

Though Peter Baert's father was a church organist, he also owned a Juno60 synthesizer that both filled the family garage with wild noises and left an indelible impression upon a four-year-old boy. Years later, the son's musical journey would continue as he cut drum loops into fragments and eventually created cinematic soundscapes with a pc. It doesn't surprise that some of those same techniques re-appear, albeit in more sophisticated form, on the debut album Touch#6 (issued on his Nisan label). Baert created the album using sounds from natural instruments (the Rhodes Mark II most prominently, its delicate sparkle clearly audible in “A107” though its 'natural' sound otherwise surfaces rarely) with the beats generated by cutting long loops into smaller breaks.

All of which is fine and good but what really matters is what's happening in the eleven tracks. On that note, while the album's neither genre-defying nor earth-shattering, Baert keeps things interesting by infusing the album with imagination and diversity. “Neilla Deum,” for instance, offers the unusual sound of lamenting choir voices juxtaposed with rippling clicks of static and repetitive bass throbs, while “Zodiac Love” layers scraping, spindly noises over burbling techno pulses. His affinity for edits is spotlighted on “Who We Are” where spoken words (like “How is it that we know who we are?”) are mutilated while beats splatter, groan, and grind below.

In general, Baert presents an appealing array of sounds but the album sometimes suffers compositionally, with pieces sounding more sketch-like than fully-developed: a track comprised of a looping base and overlaid noises may be interesting, for instance, but impresses more when dramatic narrative flow configures the sounds more meaningfully. Still, there's no disputing the title track's lovely ambient blur and the bucolic splendor of the pretty outro “Writing.”

April 2005