Though Seth Nehil and John Griznich (who always appears under what could conceivably be his email handle) have been collaborating since 1994, the documentation of their work together is slim, consisting only of a pair of 2002 releases, Confluence and Stria. Gyre, their first recorded collaboration in four years, finds the artists working with site-specific recordings as their media, using effects, processing, and editing to mold new forms, field recordings of places that exist only in the superimposition of the studio.
Nehil and Griznich aren’t purists when it comes to their recordings. While some prefer to preserve a recording, especially a location-based one, as a document of the junction fo a particular time and place, Nehil and Griznich aren’t interested purely in presentation. Instead, they use these recordings as a basis for a new construction, building new environs and performances after the fact. They’re not adverse to the appearance of more easily identified sounds; Gyre contains plenty of telltale sonic detritus, but the final product is one of an original synthesis. “Cast,” which opens the album, finds its momentum in what sounds like the exaggerated ambience of room tone, “dead air” recordings built into a claustrophobic mass that, at proper volume, threatens to fill the head through an invasion of the ear canal. Slowly, a shift occurs, as a reedy resonance takes the foreground, with the sound of gently falling rain. “Weald” begins with what sounds like the striking of a wooden rod on a hard surface, the irregular percussive rhythm melding with or morphing into solitary drops of water. The sounds of wildlife begin to appear, and the track’s atmosphere becomes denser as the sound sources coalesce. The track ends with more incidental percussion, though in this case the instruments seem hollow, and the sounds of falling trees shade the music ominously. “Furl” is the first track to contain what sound unabashedly like synthesized effects; it’s the album’s most ambient selection, though it has its share of percussive elements, this time seeming to focus on metal rather than wood.
Gyre is highly textural music, almost palpable in the way it inspires visions in the mind’s eye. Like the dream world’s reconfiguration of familiar artifacts, Gyre spins a web of hallucinatory sound forms, and to the mind that’s willing to enter, the album’s ambience can be quite enveloping. Users of field recordings are sometimes said to play their environments, and for Nehil and jgriznich , this statement might be applicable. But what seems more appropriate is the idea that the duo are not just playing their surroundings, but redefining the context in which they’re heard. The duo don’t engage their recordings passively, and they’re in constant interaction with their environments, both during the recording process and in the studio. Luckily, the album is as immersive for the listener as it likely was for the artists.
