ithin the first two minutes of Weather Sky , two distinct sounds rise from an anxious silence and gently push their way to the edges of the sonic foreground. The first is an impossibly high-pitched fizzle that twitches and shivers on the fringe of audibility, rasping from the internal hum of overloaded circuitry and the minutest fluctuations in current. The second is a dirty buzz carved from the crude hum of electric motors as amplified by dirty magnetic coils and pockmarked by amorphous rattles and disembodied thuds. Become acquainted with the company – sounds of generally meager volume and an almost forceful physicality – for in the course of the remaining seventy-one minutes a music bordering on the miraculous will be carved from such minimal means.


The first sound belongs to Toshimaru Nakamura’s no-input mixing desk, a typical desk mixer whose output signal has been routed through its input to create an endless feedback loop. Armed with little more than the resultant whistles and crackles of signal noise, Nakamura has emerged as a pioneer in the Japanese “onkyo” scene of improvisers – a group bent on crafting uniquely ego-defying music from the limitations “empty” instruments – and developed a unique aesthetic of interaction/non-interaction that guides the complex strata of his explorations of circuit hum. Relying on the outermost frequencies of the sound spectrum, Nakamura’s contributions initially appear almost disarmingly static, but closer inspection reveals a constantly shifting mass of frizzles and cracks fidgeting like nervous microbes in a pool of glossy feedback. His dry scratches and whines form a hushed sonic ceiling of seemingly infinite space or lash out in jagged squiggles and sharp-edged disruptions – each whistle in an ever-unfolding crisis of foreground and background interference.


The second sound belongs to Keith Rowe’s prepared guitar and electronics. Separated on Weather Sky from free improvisation’s typical rattle-and-scrape interactions, Rowe’s playing transcends any conventional references to the strings and wood of the guitar and relishes in a universe filled with the coarse drone of electric motors and amplifier buzz. The only reminders of the guitar as “musical instrument” – as opposed to a closed circuit of electrical impulse and magnetic flux – come in the form of disjointed rumblings and the rarest tonal flutter of metal dragged across resonant strings. Though the guitar’s strings are hardly ever touched, Rowe’s playing offers a surprisingly visceral presence as it fleshes out the hollow midrange suggested by Nakamura’s feedback with prickly whirrs and wood-grained hum. Pickup imperfections and the endless murmur of sixty-hertz hum become Rowe’s accomplices in his ceaseless investigation of every musical outlet suggested by this palette of incidental electrical noise.


From the album’s first flickers to its final agitated buzz, these sounds will be all-pervasive and seemingly changeless, like monolithic blocks of sounds hovering in their respective regions of the audible sound spectrum. Yet below the surface there lies a microcosm of tonal fluctuations, fluttering rhythmic pulses, and a constant stream of tiny interruptions that chatter and chirp like Morse code beeps and detuned short-wave signals adrift in a sea of static. Headphones and increased volume reveal mysterious bits of sonic debris floating just beyond the reach of easy perception – clanks of indeterminate origin, the occasional rise of a tremolo-bowed ostinato from the murk, perhaps even micro-melodies shimmering from the accumulation of overtones frequencies and the complex layers of harmonically dense noise. Periodically a new element of the drone will sharpen the listener’s attention, yet the origins and eventual departure of these sounds will pass as unnoticed as the regular ebb and flow of current through wire. On rare occasion some form of large-scale disruption, whether it be the near-cataclysmic feedback fissure from Nakamura ten minutes into the first track or Rowe’s sudden sonic fractures at the end of the third, calls for a sudden reordering of the dronescape and the click and thrum contained therein. The cycle repeats, with Rowe and Nakamura constructing a wholly new sonic environment from the same raw materials of electrical flux and mechanical malfunctions.


Weather Sky’s exerts a profoundly physical influence on its listener without the conventional devices that imply material force, such as extremes of volume or rapid-paced changes in activity. Even the most delicate sound feels as if it rubs directly on the eardrum and the slightest change in the listener’s orientation to the speakers reveals previously hidden facets in Rowe and Nakamura’s detail-rich aural environment. Even at low volumes, the richness of frequencies found on Weather Sky , from subterranean rumbles to tinnitus-evoking whimpers to throbbing midrange pulsations, forcefully command the listener’s attention and defy the very notion of “background music.” After Toshimaru Nakamura’s final splintered signal cuts out at the end of seventy-three minutes, the silence is uncommonly palpable and nearly shocking – even after repeated listens – in contrast to the suspended blanket of noise that came before. Such is the power of Weather Sky to recast the ear from its role as studied interpreter to immediate receptor of tangible physical stimuli.


Like nearly every release in the Erstwhile catalog, Weather Sky represents something of a “state of the union” address for the electroacoustic music community. Each of the three tracks reveals two of the world’s most attentive soundscape designers crafting the coarsest signals from the din of modern life into an exceptionally intricate aural sculpture whose sheer physical presence defies simple descriptors of beauty or brutality. Weather Sky is a landmark document of the new improv aesthetic, one which finds the improviser not as the master of his musical tools but in an active collaboration with the instrument’s boundless possibility and inherent, inescapable malfunctions. A masterpiece in both sophistication and exploration, Weather Sky is a beacon of light at the outer fringes of sound – essential listening for those charting the vast expanse of new music.