#tyler keen

[musicmakesyousmart]

Tyler Keen / Jacob Wick

Silt Editions

2019

[dustedmagazine]

Tim Albro/Tyler Keen — Summary Dismissal (ErstAEU)

An interviewer once asked Jean Smith of Mecca Normal to make sense of her work, and she responded “I can’t help you there, you’re on your own.” She sings, plays, writes, and paints; the response is all on you. I often think of that when playing the albums from Erstwhile Records’ ErstAEU imprint. The formal parameters are pretty clear; each CD is a first-time collaboration between two newer American noise/sound artists. But beyond that, you’re on your own. The packaging tends to be quite attractive but not terribly explanatory, and the annotation is pretty minimal. 

Take Summary Dismissal, for example. The outside of the digipak sports a fabric pattern and the inside a photo of an empty ball field. “Guitars, electronics, objects deployed by both Tim and Tyler. Recorded Nov 2013 in Jacksonville, FL by Tim at Tim’s house,” reads the credit. Is it improvised? Constructed? Music? Noise? Is it consciously conceptual or generated without prior planning? You’re on your own. 

This CD does stand out within the ErstAEU catalog for the space it gives to a guitar that is being played in such a way that you can tell what it is. You’ll hear brief strums, bright slides, and stark harmonics that might recall decades-old recordings by Keith Rowe and Derek Bailey alongside less definable bumps, scrapes, and rustles, as well as swelling feedback and low-rent electronic buzzes. But were these sounds made in response or opposition to one another? Where they placed in an imitation of free improvisation? Given the format and the lack of clues, there’s really no telling. 

And perhaps that’s the point. For all their muteness, these sounds are compelling. They command inquiry even if they decline to facilitate it, and perhaps that’s the real point of this CD. John Cage pointed out back in the days of rotary phones that it’s the act of listening that finds the music. The effort to decode sounds and the associative freight of the sounds being decoded are as much of a duet as the interaction between Keen and Albro.  

Bill Meyer