Automatisme Gap/Void

The debut collaborative album by Automatisme (Canadian producer William Jourdain) and Swiss field recordist, visual artist, writer/academic and psychogeographer Stefan Paulus, who first met through shared projects with Mille Plateaux/Force Inc, including contributions to the Ultrablack Of Music anthology. Gap/Void is based on field recordings made by Paulus during mountain expeditions in the Swiss Alps, the Caucasus, and the Arctic Circle-documenting stormy weather, high alpine winds, avalanches, and sounds emanating from glaciers and from the insides of crevices and caves. Paulus folded these recordings into hundreds of layers of sound (like the geological strata of their geographic sources) and sent these ambient/noise pieces to Jourdain as raw material for his bespoke Automatisme techniques. Gap/Void leads with five rhythmic tracks (cut to 33rpm LP) featuring Automatisme's trademark interstitial digital synthesis and elastic/erratic signal processing, followed by five companion tracks of the original ambient/drone works by Paulus reprocessed by Automatisme. (All tracks on CD/DL and LP download card.) Chain Reaction was a stylistic touchstone for the duo and Gap/Void also intends to resubstantiate the ambling, adrenal trajectories of Paulus' original mountain climbs. A fine addition to Jourdain's prolific body of recent solo and duo works, in line with his shift from the variable tempo strategies of Transit (2018, Constellation) and Alter- (2020, Mille Plateaux) toward the resurgent minimal dub/techno pulse of his Viatorism project (2020, Mille Plateaux; 2021, Diffuse Reality) and his 2021 Zeitgeist album with Beyond Humans (2021, Force Inc).