Fervor by Tom Hall

ATTN MAGAZINE:

REVIEW: TOM HALL – FERVOR
16 MAY 2017 / POSTED IN: RECORD

EL-04_frontIt’s wrong that my first impulse is to associate the word “environment” with the notions of stillness and permanence, parading the illusion that it’s down to me – the subject, the center of everything – to generate movement and action as I navigate my surroundings. In several senses, Fervor puts me in my place. Through the medium of bustling electronic collage, the place in question forms as a futuristic metropolis in the midst of construction, defined as much as the vertiginous facades of part-built skyscrapers as by the twirling boughs of a dozen cranes and the stark trunks of powerlines, illuminated by the harsh lights of exposed bulbs and neon signs winking into nascent life, the air twitching as it bears the load of communicative digital signals for the first time.

Fervor is music of exposed circuitry – a sprawling analogy to the very circuits that power each individual instrument. Synthesizers intersect each other tentatively, the resultant melodies forming only the faintest outlines of their future selves, straddling a strange line between melancholy and promise. I stand in the center of these two pieces, and I feel a sort of relative paralysis as the world builds itself around me. Chords slide across each other at different speeds and gradually find cohesion, pocked by the flicker of a thousand undiagnosed electronic faults. Compared to this panorama of intermittent voltage, shimmering lights, and building site commotion, I’m utterly still; two ears anchoring the symphonious movement of the environment all around me.

https://www.attnmagazine.co.uk/music/11854

Hall explores time, perception, and the non-linearity of everyday life, blending soundscapes and visuals into hybrid audio-visual environments. Using Max/MSP, DSP, and algorithmic techniques, he recontextualizes these concepts into translations of temporality and phenomenology.

tomhall.xyz
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