Corey Larkin - Pnomoneya

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4...according to our Business Lady on Thu 18 Nov, 2010.

Corey Larkin ain't fucking about. He's into some serious minimalism. Here he presents an improvised piece split into four movements clocking in at an hour and seventeen minutes. These improvisations are inspired by a field recording made on the subway with Larkin reinterpreting the isolated sounds of metal on metal using a number of metallic instruments like bells, bowls and gongs, all bowed to create a mass super drone of epically minimal proportions. As you can imagine, there's not much going on here but if you have the time and patience to get involved you'll be rewarded with a meditative treat of ambient proportions. I guess the point is to dwell on the drone to the extent that the minute subtleties of the piece take hold. Probably best listened to (and reviewed) on headphones as a way of shutting any outside stimuli, like a load of bald blokes filing away records, tapping on keyboards and messing about with packing tape. I'm ten minutes in... I gotta stop now and move on.

Corey Larkin's Pnomoneya is a captivating work of microtonal stasis and decay, clocking in at an hour and seventeen minutes. The initial idea behind the piece comes from a field recording made on a subway - sounds of droning metal-on-metal friction. From there, Corey set out to create a work that emulates these sounds, utilizing an array of bowed gongs, bells, and singing bowls. Over the three day recording period, Pnomoneya was completely improvised from his isolated apartment which had been frozen with thick layers of ice. The piece itself feels like a single tone, frozen within these thick layers and exposed to the listener in tiny increments. Each of the four sections of Pnomoneya isolate the listener as different pitches wax and wane. Overall the piece is completely fluid and weightless with influences from minimalist composer La Monte Young.

"A close listening exercise in hard-core drone isolationism..." - Textura

"The sounds aren't hypnotic in the Reich/Riley sense, rather they hang in the mind like monolithic blocks of colour, apparently solid yet actually composed of slightly varying layers, that you only notice slowly, as you examine. It's a rewarding experience." - Terrascope

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