Hilton, Craig & Tomas Phillips

le gout de neant

Label: Absinth Records Country: Germany

The collaboration between Tomas Phillips and Craig Hilton runs a fine line between composition and improvisation and digital and acoustic properties. Utilizing a series of low frequencies, isolated microsounds and processed guzheng improvisation, their work attempts to generate an immersive sound environment that allows space for the listener to be an active participant in the music, thus inviting a particular quality of engagement beyond the confines of casual listening. The opening track, "Sans mouvement I," is a studio recording for solo guzheng; the following compositions utilize this material and continue adding layers while paradoxically stripping the compositional field to a minimalist tapestry of sonic events. Le Goût du néant marks their first joint effort. While not necessarily following the hopeless sensibility of Baudelaire's poem - from which the music takes its name - this collection of tracks does exercise a certain austerity. And it is within such an atmosphere of "nothingness" (néant), the music might suggest, where "je contemple d'en haut le globe en sa roundeur" ("from heights I contemplate the roundness of the world") - a deceptively simple goal.