HMS 000 / P|1

Coelacanth
The Chronograph
Partition Records
Limited to 500 copies with hand rusted covers

out of print

Sound much more than visual culture or the poetics of language often eludes the self-explanation of from demonstrative signifiers. In categorizing sound within the semiotic realm, contemporary post-structuralist theories and utopian ideologies may add baroque flourishes to the sound work at hand; but such overemphasis upon intention over execution has the potential to leave the work aesthetically hollow. Thus it is not uncommon to find within experimental musics that meaning is assigned to the work before an audience can develop a critical reading for themselves. Collaborating under the moniker Coelacanth, Loren Chasse and Jim Haynes have intentionally reversed this dialogue to put the aesthetic process ahead of a conceptual manifestation by favoring evocation, empathy, and transcendence through sound. Initially, Coelacanth's quest may have been to engage the drone supreme, an aesthetic previously sought by C.M. von Hausswolff, Morton Feldman, and :zoviet*france:. Yet, the duo is known to get distracted by the minutiae of sound itself, or some instantaneous revelation about the history of decay, or simply the sublime beauty of nature. The drone in fact does go on, but it's course is quite circuitous.

The Chronograph is the debut release from Coelacanth. The album opens with an lengthy passage of creakingly creepy submariner ambience as if the oxidization process itself had been amplified within the realm of the audible. Spiked electrical surges and controlled feedback oscillations build the intensity of the album, until Coelacanth unleashes their symphony of tiny whirring machines, gritty textual striations, and clattering pulsations. The Chronograph then descends into a blissful tone float of dense bell reverberations and oceanic washes of shortwave. Independent of each other, both Haynes and Chasse have qualified this album as 'phosphorescent'.