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Ezekiel Honig
1. going sailing refrain 1 Design by Aesthetic Parcel video for Concrete and Plastic video for Fractures and Fissures (part 1) |
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It hardly surprises that Ezekiel Honig's Scattered Practices takes the inspiration for its title from Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life (originally published in 1974 as L'invention du quotidien). Just as the French philosopher's text examines how individuals transform and thereby personalize elements of mass culture -- rituals, utilitarian objects, language, street plans, et al -- so too does the New York composer allow sounds culled from everyday life to assume an integral presence in his own work. By manipulating an original sound so that its identity is obscured without being wholly lost, Honig imbues the seemingly mundane with an intricately developed sonic richness. Beyond the album's conceptual dimension lie the compositions themselves, multi-layered spectra of warm micro-melodies and tonal motifs enveloped by organic rhythms and textures. More intimate than his previous releases, Scattered Practices continues Honig's idiosyncratic composing style into ambient, techno, and electro-acoustic environments. The album's ten minimal settings incorporate a modicum of sounds, typically a skeletal core of gentle heartbeat rhythms accompanied by the resonant glow of entrancing keyboard figures and a mutating array of found sounds. With its muffled Rhodes chords, softly rocking shuffle, and percussive rattles and clicks, "Homemade Debris" perfectly encapsulates the album's textured aura and lulling ambiance. The beats ever so slowly recede over the course of its 10-minute duration, leaving in its wake a sonorous symphony of dreamy melancholia -- a description one could just as easily apply to Scattered Practices as a whole. |
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