PARALLEL 03 is a living network of sounds, texts, and abstraction. Led by Endlings – the duo of Pulitzer winning Diné composer Raven Chacon and Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich – along with sound artists from the Vancouver New Music Circle, the project was born out of the intimate digital community shared in the early stages of the pandemic. Out August 22 on Whited Sepulchre, the album comprises 14 experimental soundscapes and improvisations; and an accompanying web instrument designed to accept new fragments and generative ideas from its users to prolong the ephemerality of the project.
With the first track, we are abruptly thrust into the sonic landscape of Endlings – a multidimensional maze of energy expanding and contracting. Muffled speaking is established as a throughline, with much of the voice placed at the same dynamic as chittering winds, churning percussion, plinking guitar strings, and an unspecified groaning. No single sound takes precedent, as the artists instead toy with density as the driving force behind each vignette. As layers of noise are peeled back, the auditory dissolution reveals hidden elements you may have missed the first time through – but were present the entire time.
While largely intangible, refrains of technologic complexity, spirituality, and identity are saturated through the album; Endlings and their collaborators aptly distill the 2020s zeitgeist as we enter a new era of human-machine interaction and simultaneously face AI advancement and ecological destruction. The anxious and desolate electronic plundering in “Coil Drinking” sonifies the idea that even the smallest parts of machinery are alive. On “Blurred Proud,” buried breaths pulse through gurgling clicks and pops to evoke the existence of a machine-creature hybrid. The way the artists wield tension and ambiguity encourages listeners to use their own intuition and imagination – a direct challenge to late-stage capitalism’s reliance on dream-crushing in order to sustain complacency with injustices.
“Protrio Veneno” is similarly imbued with technomancy, but dips further into the surreal. The track sits on a digital forest chattering with textural static and electric lifeforms. Audio artifacts – unwanted disruptions that appear in the production process of recordings – click noticeably within the tapestry. In a moment of clarity, the most pronounced spoken word on the album eerily narrates the presence of a demon before the track bursts wide open; drumset keeps steady while dull string pizzicati thunk, and winds squeal and honk asymmetrically. This use of sparsity and stillness before explosive final gestures or codas permeates the album.
Listening to PARALLEL 03 evokes a similar feeling to reading Mark Z. Danielewski’s behemoth and multi-layered House of Leaves – each offering a surplus of hallways and doors, nestled within their own hallways and doors. “No One Under the Earth” is a strikingly grounded track with a lilting groove, gorgeous swirling drone, and distantly mixed singing placed just above a garden of shimmery textures. “The Blue Keyboard” and “Two Cheers for Anarchy” both feature lush ambient chords juxtaposed with freakish maximal drums or mechanical clanking and whirring. Just under 40 seconds, “See It In The Room” is the prettiest composition on the record – a lo-fi melange of melodic piano and guitar that plays back like a wonky half-memory respite before entering another part of the labyrinth.
With the cavernous and sonically-rich “Launder Our Identity,” there is an allusion to concealing or placating oneself as a tool of survival against white supremacy. While it works on a level of internet anonymity – there is also a nebulous statement on how deep collaboration and congruence is forged around liberatory practices that uplift the most marginalized members of our society. This heaviness is also felt in the desperate, distorted sputters of “Almost Sorry,” and in the hardcore-song-ran-through-a-blender, “Through I Wonder Attention.”
Describing their creative process as “a shared folder, a translation device… and a bridge,” Endlings and their collaborators have collaged an open-ended journey of poetic imagery and inquiry. Rather than spell it out for you, PARALLEL 03 delivers its ideas as an invitation to forge our own connections.
I CARE IF YOU LISTEN is an editorially-independent program of the American Composers Forum, and is made possible thanks to generous donor and institutional support. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author and may not represent the views of ICIYL or ACF.
You can support the work of ICIYL with a tax-deductible gift to ACF. For more on ACF, visit composersforum.org.
