Tended like a garden

In a better universe the fragile, splintery beauty of Akira Rabelais's Then The Substanceless Blue (from Caduceus, idiotically placed just outside LMYE's Festive 50 of 2010) would be lauded as the great, wilful pop tune - complete with deliriously romantic & affecting video (below) - it so obviously is...

Blurb: "On his Samadhisound debut, Spellewauerynsherde, Akira Rabelais crafted austere settings to found recordings of Icelandic songs of lament. His follow-up, Caduceus, is a different beast – a study of guitar and extreme distortion that’s both harsh and mesmerising. samadhisound founder David Sylvian describes it as “caustically romantic”: “Akira's recording presents you with an auditory experience quite unlike any other. It's by turns a brutal and discomforting ride. Outside of the full-on audio assault, there's unsettling disquiet in its quietude. Once heard it won't be forgotten and for those seeking out recorded music that is transformative, experiential, this material has that potency.”

Raised in Texas, Rabelais played guitar in a series of Austin-based bands throughout the 80's before moving into electronic music, going on to study at Bennington College and the California Institute of Arts. Rabelais recalls, “I think the first glimmer of Caduceus came in the summer of 1996, in a Milan hotel as I was suffering through food poisoning and jet lag... all the water trying leave my body at once, while I was working on source for a show. I reverted to a former self, sometime in the late 80's, an echo of my Austin days spent playing in dreamy industrial bands with aggressive distortion.”

To create Caduceus, Rabelais processed recordings of guitar through the Argeïphontes Lyre, a software instrument of his own design. It’s a decade-old codebase that’s written like a poem and tended like a garden: as Rabelais explains, his work comes from a process of “music driving software, and software feeding music.” “I was always making little instruments as a child, lots of odd stringed things and percussion bits … metal plates along a barbed-wire fence. I think AL descends from this bloodline. It scratches my four year old self’s itch to ring metal plates with a bb-gun."

Then The Substanceless Blue

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