’ve spent too many hours in books. Everything in my life becomes an abstraction. Everything in my life, even my relationships (much to their detriment), is reduced to a pattern. It goes without saying that pop music is often boring because it relies on an overused pattern, a worn out structure. Improvised music (O the continents of sound that that moniker signifies!) is perennially fascinating because the listener never knows what the pattern is going to be. It is only after repeated listens that a semblance of syntax emerges for an involved listener. This syntax being extemporaneous, a grammar cannot be formed. More often than not words are absent from improvised music. Words are the most ambiguous of signs, yet at the same time, they are the most common of signs within contemporary society (and among the most recognizable as long as the words are written in a language you understand). Words being absent from improvised music can lead to very precise and intricate (if abstract) cognitions in the mind of listener, or the opposite end the spectrum, complete obscurity due to lack of recognizable reference points; e.g., “Turn off that damn buzzing noise!”

Bridges is the kind of record that provides plenty of engaging patterns and textures for the interested listener. Will Guthrie, Matthew Earle, and Adam Süssman, three of Australia’s most notable experimental improvisers, work up tension building drones interspersed with restrained scraping, plucking, and tinkling. In the liner notes instruments listed are electronics, percussion, and prepared guitars. Each is attached to a particular performer’s name, but given the nature of music created, and the limitless palette of anyone of the three previously mentioned ‘instruments’ it’s hard to tell who is playing what. Earle is probably the one responsible for the droning. Not that I think it matters. Interplay and communication, if not outright polyphony (albeit a polyphony composed of a minimal number of elements), is what is being attempted here.

Those results are largely achieved. If these bridges go anywhere it’s inside the nervous system of a very anxious person. Minutia flutter in an out. As with all minimal art these minutia are pivotal. The resonant pluck at the beginning of “Bridges 1” rings like the first four notes of Beethoven’s fifth. Metallic grumbling noises slowly introduce themselves in its wake. The sounds have a roundness that renders them quite organic, as opposed to an alienating tinny-ness. Sputtering percussion soon overtakes them. It’s a thick, frothy pulse that could just as easily be considered a drone. Sine waves shimmer above and below of the surface of these fuller sounds. Random clicks, plucks, underwater bangs surprise us now and again. Eventually the sine waves dominate. Layers of hum envelope us and the other sounds. Some of these droning blankets are warm and velvety, while others are grating like an office fire alarm in someone else’s dream intruding your nighttime visions. Through the loose ends of this the metallic grumblings come back, only louder. Any repetition can mask itself as a traditional rhythm. Here the percussive elements exist in a tender, rarified zone teasing between structure and chaos. This is the musical equivalent of sexual ambiguity.

“Bridges 2” and “Bridges 3” exhibit the same sort of structure. Timbres are different, but the methodology remains the same. Pointillism and larger, sweeping tones compete for speaker space with the big, droning tones winning in the end. Both compositions finish with competitively louder sheets of sound. Maybe the album was conceived this way. The three sections gradually getting more intense. Deeper and deeper, up the spine of our psyche patient.

The catch is, even if these sounds are representational of a contemporary psyche, rarely does the contemporary citizen (at least one of my economical class) have the time and energy available to devote to the deep listening necessary to fully appreciate a record like this. If this record was truly brilliant it would pull the listener in outside of his own accord and fascinate them against their will. Certain sounds, even unchanging ones, are like fractals—infinitely engrossing. Earle, Guthrie, and Süssman distill this sonic philosopher’s stone only fleetingly. The way that it stands you’ll get as much out of Bridges as you are willing to put into it. I don’t have the time, but I have the intellectual inclination. I’m lonely and selfish and bored. I say Buzz On!