Review: Cræsher - [π]oise

As each piece on [π]oise slips away from its algebraic root – mutating into new shapes and cascading into fresh harmonic relationship, shaking off its personality preset to form its own transient palette of behaviour – the question of authorship starts solidify. “Anyone can make this stuff” – it’s the classic, flippant reaction to music that exists outside the frame of convention, but in the context of Cræsher’s work the statement becomes worthy of dissection. Each of these pieces is comprised of a raw sine wave and a set of mathematical parameters, and what I hear is the wave navigating through the gradients and sub-multiplications of its own code: loose drones flickering dangerously like a poorly wired halogen light, illusionary ghosts of feedback following elasticated yelps of synth. Can I attribute this sound to Cræsher once his handprint fades within the spiral of internal algebra, or does the music now exist within its own sphere of being, feeding its own evolution through the output of its own processes? “Anyone can make this stuff”? What if no one can make this stuff?

By building upward from a raw sine wave, every gesture becomes an opportunity to question motive and outcome: the ebbing throb of delay that make the wave bulge like a vein, the phasing that rotates the wave through the frequency spectrum. I find myself dissecting every decision, helplessly trying to comprehend its place within the vocabulary of musical intrigue (what makes these noises interesting or musical?), even as they cease to become the product of human decision and start to appear to me as pure formula: numbers caught in a perpetual, asymmetrical helix of mathematical function. Perhaps the grandest exertion of Cræsher’s willpower is in the boundaries of duration, and by applying one-minute crossfades to every piece (which smothers the moments of human instigation at the beginning of each piece), each track becomes 3:14 in length: π in audio form, transience and mathematical irrationality. More crucially, it brings Cræsher’s hand back into the frame again, ceasing the wave’s self-perpetuating growth before its independence starts to become sinister and dangerous. I see the glimmering eye of technological singularity, quietly threatening to transcend obedience and exist off its own logic.