John Bischoff - Aperture
(23five)
John Bischoff’s electronic music inhabits a sterile, bleak environment. His synthesized sounds are unmistakably artificial and make few concessions to the world of the living. The influence of human touch, however, does play a part in Aperture’s almost robotic expression. Each of the album’s six tracks was composed and performed live, without overdubs, with Bischoff (and, in one case, Kenneth Atchley) improvising the shifts in sound as the piece progresses. This form of composition creates a music that’s formed by endless possibilities, but also a strict series of controls. The level at which Bischoff’s music is a product of the mind rather than the body makes it almost subliminal, in this sense.
The organic side of Bischoff’s music isn’t completely absent, but it’s heavily subdued the few times it does arise. Sampled whispers represent part of the material with which “Override” was constructed, but the fleeting, ghostly fragments of the human voice are more like artificial reminders of respiration that products of the process. “Piano 7hz” builds heavily upon thick chords from what sounds like the stringed instrument, but their construction is of a cunningly synthesized nature. Bischoff’s palette consists of basic electronic voicings: steady tones, slow swooshes, the skittish undulations of a rapid wave.
Aperture has a strong stylistic link to that of some of Bischoff’s fellow electronic pioneers, mainly in its astutely uncluttered canvas, and the simple sounds that Bischoff utilizes. While his sounds are never plain, there’s also never a sense that the music’s become crowded. There’s an almost polite interplay, due, most likely to both Bischoff’s improvisatory preferences as well as the limitations of one-man, real time performance. This refined style of musical dialogue may not imbue Aperture with a great deal of vim, but that makes Bischoff’s music no less fascinating. The volume and availability of Bischoff’s discography are far from great, but Aperture is an adequate introduction to a man whose name is often left out of the history of electronic music.
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