Reviewed by: Dan Warburton

Elegantly presented with cover art by Alorenz and Felice Frankel, and with track info printed in reverse on tiny squares of onion-skin vellum, "lowercase-sound 2002" is an ambitious and impressive double CD compilation curated by Californian sound artist Josh Russell. The term "lowercase" was adopted by composer Steve Roden in 1998 (to refer to a music that "bears a certain sense of quiet and humility [..] it must be discovered") before being adopted by Boston-based thereminist James Coleman as the title of a discussion group on the subject, and though Roden himself isn't along the 33 artists/groups featured here, Coleman does make an appearance with his Undr Quartet (with Greg Kelley, Vic Rawlings and Liz Tonne).

Bremsstrahlung's Russell has divided the tracks into "music weighted towards the recording of physical materials" (this disc bears a large dot instead of a number) and "more purely electronic compositions" (the 'dash' disc), though it's sometimes unclear how he decides which is which. Surely Bob Sturm's "100:200111 Torrey Pines Outer Buoy", though derived from data collected on waves and coastal erosion, is as "electronic" as Ronnie Sundin's "_siesmol" (this latter sourced in part from sounds recorded not too far away on a Santa Monica beach), but Sturm's piece is on the dot disc and Sundin's on the dash (similarly, Jonas Lindgren's "Groundwater", explicitly sourced in recordings of flood water in the Swedish town of Sundsvall, would seem to be more at home on the dot disc, but it's on the dash instead). In accordance with the dot/dash conceit, Russell indicates track durations not in minutes and seconds, but in "breaths" (on the dot) and "samples" (the dash disc). Six minutes would seem to be the maximum allotted time-span, but some pieces say all they have to say much faster. Several are slight and eminently forgettable, but most are strikingly original, notably Bernhard Gal's "Zhu Shui" (an installation featuring four whistling kettles brought to and taken off the boil), Russell's own "bp 70/32" (whose sound sources include a discarded cell phone running out of batteries, a helium balloon and bacteria freezing in a dry-ice methanol bath), Yannick Dauby's beautifully intimate exploration of female vocalisms and stones ("In Dolem") and Joseph Siemion's "Discourse", whose low-register sine waves may, be warned, cause your speakers to "fail". Argentinian originals Reynols reappear with another piece sourced from blank tapes (there was a whole album's worth a while back on the trente oiseaux label), and Vienna-based Radu Malfatti contributes a brief piece for three (overdubbed) trombones that uses a random-number generating computer program written by his son Ben to place isolated tones into a predetermined silent time frame. In contrast to such stark modernism, the notes accompanying Dale Lloyd's "Fleeting Recollections of the Snow Plain" ("finally we put aside the distractions and glance out into the frozen landscape and meditate on the beauty of nature") inscribe themselves solidly in a tradition dating back to Thoreau and Emerson, and also recall Ives' famous commentary on the final movement of his Second String Quartet.

Impressive as these works are, one feels that Russell might have included more purely acoustic lowercase music (in accordance with his dot/dash aesthetic separation): the contributions from Seattle's Animist Orchestra and the aforementioned Undr Quartet are delicate and beautiful, but are all too easily dwarfed by more superficially impressive (maybe oppressive) works nearby by Siemion and Jason Lescalleet. There's much diversity in instrumental lowercase music too, from Malfatti's colleagues in the Wandelweiser group (Russell only has to look up the road to find Michael Pisaro) to the network of reductionist improvisers slowly and discreetly spreading throughout the world (in Boston, London, Berlin and Tokyo). As Steve Roden, Bernhard Günter, Richard Chartier, Taku Sugimoto and Sachiko M (to name a few) have enjoyed quite considerable exposure over recent years, I won't bemoan their exclusion here, but had Russell chosen to dispense with the rather slight offerings from Electric Company, John Hudak, Dave Gross and Francisco Lopez, he might have had space to include something by the likes of Taku Unami, Mark Wastell and Nikos Veliotis.

The dash disc starts with a real conceptual coup, Otaku Yakuza's "The Space of a Second", which, the composer proudly informs us, consists of one thousand samples (each a microsecond in duration) from sources as hilariously diverse as Keith Rowe, Varèse, Leo Kottke and Aphex Twin. You'll have to take his word for it, for despite the hours that one assumes went into its creation, the track sounds like nothing more than a needle being dragged brutally across a vinyl (even loaded into SoundForge and slowed down several times - out of curiosity I tried - it's almost impossible to spot the source material). After this tiny raspberry, another one of Francisco Lopez's "Untitled" series (number 118) comes roaring out of the speakers. Just joking - he doesn't play the Death Metal card this time - though I seriously wonder how many people go out of their way to collect the complete Lopez discography. The Ronnie Sundin piece that follows at least has a sting in its tail - just in case you thought lowercase music absolutely had to be almost inaudible throughout - and Akira Rabelais's "disjectimembrapoetaeeatelich" is as inscrutable as its title (and Rabelais' wonderful website). There's a fine expressive sweep to Dan Abrams' "Feature", a deft nod to sophisticated ambient in Peter Van Hoesen's "objectseq" and a fascinatingly intricate filigree offering from Michael Schumacher, but Stephan Mathieu's "Flake" seems to do just that, and the sequence of tracks by Tetsu Inoue, Taylor Deupree and Kim Cascone could have come from just about any compilation of new electronic music. Being mixed at an overall low dynamic level doesn't automatically confer upon music the quiet and humility referred to in Roden's original definition of "lowercase": Toshi Nakamura's "nimb #20" is a pretty disturbing piece despite its restricted vocabulary and timbral palette, while the above-mentioned roar of Lindgren's "Groundwater" is almost Beethovenian in its grandeur - and "lowercase" is certainly not an adjective I associate with Ludwig. Still, it's churlish to quibble; "lowercase-sound 2002" is a well-researched and beautifully produced and highly recommended collection of accomplished music, and I'm pleased to report that Russell and Bremsstrahlung have embarked on a whole series of 3" CD releases to follow. Watch this space. Or, rather, join the dots and follow the dashes.