As long and mesmerizing the other recent Cold Spring release is, as short and in your face the collaboration between Drew Daniel and John Wiese is. “Continuous Hole” is the result of Drew (known from Matmos) and John (a.o. Sissy Spacek and together with Phil Blankenship in LHD) ten-year collaboration where they recorded and reworked sounds into rhythmic patterns. But the question is: Is this a rhythmic album? Well, it’s not danceable if that is what you think. It is more structured than rhythmic, which is – as you might have understood from a year of reading my reviews – how I mostly like my rhythms. Of course, I like rhythmic music, but that is for dancing; this is an album for listening.
I’ve listened to the album several times, and the origin of the sounds remains a mystery for me. They’re probably from all over the place, samples, field recordings, computer generated and everything in between or outside that perspective. This mystery adds to the mystery and enjoyment of this album. And when you listen carefully, you might hear a bit of the subdued yet heavily manipulated layers of Coil’s ‘Love’s Secret Domain’ or ‘Stolen and Contaminated’ era. Now the question is whether Drew or John have been exploding frogs to get those sounds…
The eleven tracks have a total playing time of only 36 minutes, making it quite short. It’s mostly well thought of experiments in a well-guided direction, but except for a few of the longer tracks (like “Abhorred Shears”, “Done It” or “Sleek Disorder”) the tracks focus on the experiment instead of telling a story as a track. Not that that isn’t good, because it’s all delightful in a kind of glitchy musique concrete collage way. But a tiny bit more coherency would have added a bit to the continuity.
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