Anthony Tan: Susurrus
genseng records

Given that “susurrus” is defined as “a whispering or rustling sound,” one might reasonably anticipate that the musical material Anthony Tan crafted for his twenty-five-minute EP would be pitched at a hush. But while the two long-form pieces do definitely rustle, they seldom whisper. The Vancouver Island-based experimental composer derived ninety-nine percent of the sounds on the release from a nine-foot concert grand piano; those sounds, however, functioned as a mere starting point for the dramatic electronic manipulations to which they were subjected.

Hearing Susurrus with no awareness of the production processes involved, a listener might presume that piano, percussion, and other instruments had been used to generate the pieces—exactly the kind of explorative material one would expect from someone whose instrumental practice involves “signal processing, synthesized models, sampling, and field recording” and professed music research interests include “post-acousmatics, timbre theory, music perception, composer-performer paradigms, and inclusive pedagogy.”

endlessnessnessness, its title taken from Joyce's Ulysses, boldly exploits the resonant potential piano affords as Tan extracts from its keys and other parts of the instrument all manner of sonorities. With a high-pitched, almost subliminal electronic stream whirring in the background and a muffled percussive accent pounding a rhythm, piano sounds are used as punctuation and stretched into thrumming washes. As layers accumulate, the piece leaves any association with a whisper far behind, Tan instead opting for a controlled inferno of expanding sound. As the piece enters its second half, the turbulence of the first morphs into a claustrophobic cauldron of curdling noise and tactile texture the listener's helplessly pulled into. Eventually, the nightmarish tone eases to allow a more stable orientation to establish itself.

While Tan's liner note clarifies that the second piece, sublime subliminal sublimate, involves the motivic performance and digital alteration of a “thirty-seven chord palindromic sequence,” one again experiences it as a daring exploration of the piano's sound-generating potential. Notes transform into liquid forms, phase-stretched entities, tightly coiled ripples, and stuttering thrums, the result an ever-writhing, hauntological mass. The second piece unfolds at a more even keel than the first, but both are equally absorbing when their sound worlds are so enticingly rich in detail.

March 2023