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David Lee Myers continues his legend with the meditative suites of “Reduced to a Geometrical Point”. Noise music, at least for the aficionados, can be seen to be the other side of that ambience coin. At first grating, it eventually gives way to something far different, a trip of sorts. While David Lee Myers may not be a household name for noise heads, his work as Arcane Device certainly serves as some of the best noise music to come out of the 90s. Featuring some truly abrasive textures Arcane Device managed to land some records with RRR Records run by Ron Lessard, another legend within the US noise community. With this album David takes his lessons learned from those old projects to reconfigure them into a transcendental experience.

Uneasy buzzing opens the album up with “Laurentia”. With an eerie ominous tone about it, the drone extends off into the infinite. Volume needs to be watched for he does take things further than one would expect. Over the course of the piece, it begins to shift into lighter textures, featuring rather exquisite fragments of melody. Quite mystical “Pannotia” brings the tension down to reside within a strange, looping groove. “Gondwana” mixes both the harshness and the airiness in, never neatly settling into either. Easily the loudest and most industrial churn radiates from the extended shapes of “Pangea”.

“Reduced to a Geometrical Point” features an exquisite take on a unique combination of ambient and noise, in a way that only David Lee Myers, an individual well versed in both, can do. 

via Beach Sloth

Sometimes I need to repeat myself (I don’t mind), and surely I wrote the next thing before: ever since I stumbled upon music by David Lee Myers, I am a big fan. I guess it was already with his LP, ‘Engine Of Myth, for the unlikely label Recommended Records (not always known for the most out-there sort of electronic music). That was under the guise of Arcane Device, which he continued throughout the nineties. For many years, he releases under his given name. What I found fascinating about his music was that he used feedback, but in a much different way than those who called themselves power electronics, say Whitehouse or Ramleh. There was more control and less abuse; almost like a grandson of the fifties and sixties composers of serious electronic music. On this new release, he works with the notion of “audio constructions [that] seem to encourage a posture of staying in the moment. This has proven to be a fascination over time.” You can call it music for meditation, but Myers says he doesn’t like that. He also says that “as I began the present sonic explorations, a quote from metaphysics scholar Frithjof Schuon kept coming to mind: “You must detach your life from an awareness of the multiple and reduce it to a geometrical point before God.” Certainly, Schuon was not referring to any particular Judeo-Christian vision of a supreme being, but rather, whatever ultimate creative force of the universe must exist. So becoming “reduced to a geometrical point before God” was a concept that resonated for me while working on the pieces.” The working titles he used, ‘Geo 1’ etc, became an Earth reference, maybe adding meaning to the music. Maybe not. Myers uses “feedback matrics, oscillator banks,  and multi-processing”, which is not much different from when he started, but maybe the means are a bit more sophisticated? This is not really meditative music, of course, certainly not when the volume is put to a level that has a bit more presence. I am sure some people love their meditation to be loud, but the music as played by David Lee Myers is at times too dirty and strange to do such a thing, but, yes, people are strange as mister Morrison once sang, so for all I know, people might find this an excellent soundtrack for some deep meditation. I enjoy such things differently, I guess, not being too much interested in meditation (which, despite advancing age, and peers doing so, still is not a thing for me), but I enjoy my minimal music a lot. The variation played by Myers is one of considerable force and bruitist style, but also with some finer sustaining powers, sticking into a sound for a while, before slowly morphing into something else. It may no longer have the raw power of his earliest work (which also back then quickly toned down), but it is still a most enjoyable ride for about an hour or so. Maybe not really a big surprise anymore, but yet another high-quality work by one of the best when it comes to playing imaginative electronic music and with a strong voice of his own. (FdW)

via Vital Weekly