NVO stands for Non Visual Objects, a pretty apt descriptor for a label to paint its releases with. On this "collaborative" Non-Collaboration with writer and sound delimiter Montgomery, label honcho Friedl actualizes some of the most "visual" sounds to arise yet out of a back catalog sporting some of the most determinedly lowercase indeterminacies since Bernhard G�nter's late, lamented Trente Oiseaux imprint. The crux of these recordings began as literal joint efforts between the two participants, until Montgomery decided that the collusion between Friedl's acoustics and his own electronics failed to mesh. Montgomery then preceded to "absorb" Friedl's elements wholly into his own to arrive at the final results presented herewith, in effect using Friedl's sounds as "sample food"; whether or not this passes muster as a true "collaboration" is a question of semantics left for littler minds to ponder.

Regardless of its theories of origin, Non-Collaboration nevertheless is far more tactile and tangible than NVOs previous. Despite Montgomery's aberrant processing and digital bric-a-brac, the library of fuzzes, buzzes, cusses, and smudges crawling, smarting, and heckling about mimic "real world" bells, whispers, engine hum, hard-drive trills, restless soldier ants, dry breezes. It's easy to imagine a digital terrarium of sorts housing all these organic and inorganic particles, our ears becoming the looking glass through which we witness their parallel movements. Even Montgomery's titling reflects precise flora and fauna: "Berry", "Bolt", "Head", "Man", "Thorn", et al. It's a peculiar menagerie of dispersed noises, seemingly arbitrary in its bit-mapping, and therein lies the proverbial rub. Montgomery's blurring of his and Friedl's tints lack any objective anchor or thematic coherence; it's as if the sounds simply dropped down from above to land on the master tape. G�nter understood this principle, even from sonic events as austere as these, that whatever ripples made in such sound currents possessed some measure of resolve, no matter how abstract those resolutions might be. As is, Montgomery's over-arching digital anomalies remain just that: attractive enough on face, interesting enough where they need to be, but there's little connective tissue holding the disparate strands together to make for anything other than a largely intellectualized listen.