Platform delivers another very fine release on his own MRM imprint. Essentially a CDr to keep you going until the next full length album, this is a focused, varied and engaging series of cuts. Carrying on the experimental tones of the Platform 2, this has moments that get right into the nitty gritty of sound design and construction. Tense textures, static sounds and shifting melodic elements give you a sense of space, whilst during the shorter tracks there's a more abrasive sense of off-kilter percussion. Add to that some rumbling, dron-esque underlying sounds and you've got yourself a great CD. I'm thinking that fans of Sebastien Roux and Room40 as well as Raster Noton are going to love this. Props to label and artist for providing us with more interesting, low-key material. Great stuff.
(Smallfish Records)
I seem to recall writing about a CD by Platform a bit ago and thinking it was pretty cool. Well Matthew Atkins makes a welcome return with his 5 track CD 'Distanced'. It's kinda weird, mellow electronics with the emphasis on synth sounds and futuristic ones at that. Lots of tones, hisses, blips and metallic sounds create a sense of rhythm without percussion. 'Brittle Boned' has some wicked eerie atmospherics, electronic drips and clicks. I think I've said this before but I can well imagine this guys stuff coming out on Raster Noton.
(Norman Records)
There's one aspect of electronic music production that has long annoyed me and that is the use of deliberately painful high pitched sounds for prolonged periods of time. Platform (Matthew Atkins) opens his album Distanced with 3 minutes of the most alienating high pitch sitting above the background texture. It's unfortunate because every time I listen to the album it puts me in a negative frame, undermining much of the excellent sounds that follow. I normally end up fast forwarding through the section and then feel I'm not being fully immersed in the work.
What follows it is actually quite good. Simple textures and ambient sounds are processed without ending up sounding overly digitised. As the ear tunes in to the various timbres, very recognisable sounds emerge - a flittering typewriter, a modem connection, crinkling paper. A nice balance is developed between expansive backgrounds and intimate foregrounds. As the half hour of music across the disc evolves, a definite arc can be traced as proceedings become quieter and quieter and the listener is drawn in to a more active role. Sounds are stripped to bare particles, gently flowing across the stereo spectrum.
I've taken to listening to this disc without its first 3 minutes. While the overall scheme of the recording - a gradual shift from aggressive alienation to intimate caressing - makes sense of the initial piercing, it's hard for all the warmth of the latter half of the disc to coax me out of the bad mood that one sound can put me in. Without it I can enjoy the entire journey much more effectively.
(Cyclic Defrost)
Despite it's lo-fi colour xerox exterior, Platform capably represent a school of thought that perhaps began with Shuttle 358, deploying an armoury of undisclosed digital techniques, and sampler-play to activate an abstract field of sound that could never conceivably be termed “music”. Platform experiment with a reduced atmosphere, minimal scenery given dramatic light and shade with various events that range from the serene, to gristly an dynamic swirls of sound. The work of Richard Devine springs to mind here, or perhaps early work by Duul_Drv. These 5 pieces, encompass a range of techniques, all predominantly minimal in feel, with plenty of empty spaces and un-announced silences to reduce the pace. Highlights perhaps would be Brittle Boned, and finale, White Space, just for their sheer ambition and dynamics , as well as an oblique choice of sounds. Well worth a listen. BGN
(White Line)
It's nice when the label's name faithfully describes how the music was made, and it's also great to see that a handmade limited edition hides a talent that deserves acknowledgement, especially in virtue of a well-visible compositional individuality in a field - that of home-produced electronics - which defining “congested” is almost pathetic by now, every computer or keyboard owner on the earth waking up one morning and shouting “I want to be creative” at the sky, fists shaken in the air. Moreover, Matt Atkins - deus ex machina behind the Platform project, this being its third release - wisely keeps things on the short side, the CD clocking at 30 minutes without an ounce of dullness. Five segments that take into account and consideration the sounds of life (and some unreasonable ones too), which get selected, heavily altered and therefore rendered unrecognizable or, in any case, pretty de-contextualized. A magnetic cycle of electronic fragments is heard in the opening “In praise of rust”, followed by the acrid disordered noisescape of “Spectre”. “The drained lake” is built upon striking rumbling frequencies, scarred by recurring synthetic buzzing flies and clanging metals in the faraway lands of hall reverb. The overall best comes with the unbelievably mournful alien lament that follows the initial digital disarray of “Brittle boned”, a terribly forlorn, slanted spiral - which stops me in my tracks whenever it comes - that gets finally buried by irrepressible interferences, while the final “White space” juxtaposes sharp highs and unbalanced waves in a disconcerting soundtrack for a crumbling psyche, voices from unfamiliar galaxies depicting a bleak scenario of miserable beings swallowed by their own ambiguity. I feel somewhat gratified for having been sent one of the 50 copies of this off-line, brilliantly conceived work.
(Touching Extremes)
credits
released May 1, 2008
Matthew Atkins - Electronics and Processing
MRMCDR04
MRM is a DIY label for experimental music curated by Matt
Atkins, a London based sound and visual artist whose principle interests are reductionism, chance, repetition and texture. He uses objects, percussion instruments, occasionally a laptop and cassette recorders to create sound collages in both the recorded medium and live....more
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