Robert Poss and E-Clark Cornell—Kepler’s Choice (No Sides)
This second collaborative album from Band of Susans’ Robert Poss and multimedia artist and composer E-Clark Cornell takes its title from the mystic pre-modern astronomer Johannes Kepler, the scientist who plotted the orbit of the planets while placing God at the center of his model of the universe. His choice was arguably between science and theology—and he chose both. These two artists likewise conjure sprawling cosmologies of sound, animated by a precise and careful architecture but open to the possibility of spiritual mysteries.
Poss will be familiar to habitues of New York’s no wave minimalist scene. In addition to the multi-guitared Band of Susans, he has collaborated with Rhys Chatham and Phill Niblock. E-Clark Cornell is less of a known quantity, though he has an extensive discography under the latome2 name and has collaborated with cosmic electronicists including Hans-Joachim Roedelius of CLUSTER, HaDi Schmidt, and Michael Hoffmann. The two first joined forces for 2024’s Definitive Spaces, a four-cut EP of extended meditations in tone wash, piano and clattering percussion.
Kepler’s Choice is sleeker and more elegant, its sound billowing forth like an alternative reality’s orchestral movie soundtracks. It’s not clear who did what. There’s very little in recognizable guitar tone, though that doesn’t mean Poss isn’t playing one. A Dusted review of his 2018 solo album, Frozen Flowers Curse the Day observes: “Robert Poss plays the guitar like Magritte paints smoking implements, distorting, tweaking, processing, disguising and augmenting his sound so that even when a conventional blues lick or power chord emerges, you could be forgiven for thinking, ‘This is not a guitar.’” Here the sources of sound are even more obscure; long wavery tones unfurl, scattered, sometimes, with plinks of piano or oddly tuned staccato guitar.
“Russian Tea Room” is the album’s long centerpiece, unrolling in repeated waves, timeless, edgeless, serene with bits of discordant piano studding its ripple-less surface. We are not sure what it has to do with the NYC dining institution, Russia or tea, or indeed how it relates to the world as we know it. The artists have abstracted sound to the point of a celestial hum, beautiful but austere and lacking in real-world signifiers.
“SUBLIMATION o” winds a long organ dirge around skittery runs of what sounds like guitar, the wheezing foundation static while the play of notes churns up agitation on the surface. Flurries of staccato notes run in unexpected directions, stuttering up in question marks, bumping downward in reply. The guitar (or possibly piano or maybe even malleted percussion) sounds very improvised, incorporating half-steps and splats of conflicting notes, but the overall effect is poised and premediated.
These are long tracks that drone on without much incident. Nothing like a traditional melody emerges, and often you don’t even get much sense of a time signature. They are, instead, like the photos that come back from the Hubble Telescope, vast, mysterious, unconcerned with our scrubby human lives but animated by a spiritual presence. Kepler would be proud.
No one in my family can fucking cook a decent meal except me. Unfortunately for all involved parties, I’ve been depressed for the last 20 hours and have been hiding in my room.
