Review: No One – 9

No information. Just a download code to a 43-minute track. The sounds within are tentative, pale, faint – muffled tones and clumps of hiss, blustering through my hearing like tumbleweeds and clouds of dust, generating a space that is neither completely empty nor mindfully alive. This is the soundscape that exists when everything stops. Silence would be too intentional. Instead, 9 is like a dormant nocturnal scene, orchestrated from the noise that lurks around the edges of life (passing traffic, occasional birdsong, overheard conversation), persistent and indifferent, uncommunicative, degraded but not dead. There are no melodies here. 9 is just the nascent gathering of gaseous tone, clustered into mutual company by chance, throbbing with the gentle dissonances of friction and accident. I come here because I have nowhere else to be.

As such, I regularly become the active proponent of this music. I seek shapes and significance in the sounds that bring little forth of their own accord, focusing on the ripple of incidental drones and the hums of machinery left on overnight, reaching deep into the void and scrutinising every little speck of happening. Gradually, the experience starts to compound into something greater. Without the distraction of concrete meaning or vivid musical evocation, interacting with sonic objects that drain like sand through my fingers, my thoughts have nowhere to turn but inward. Gradually I return to the root of everything: existence and death, the self and authenticity. This mirage of pale shades and spectral keyboards, though formless and semantically nomadic, becomes a vessel for rich, introspective inquisitions into the nature of everything.