James Rushford – Turzets (2024) [FLAC 24bit/96kHz]

James Rushford – Turzets (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 33:04 minutes | 516 MB | Genre: Electronic
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Blank Forms Editions

Aussie concrète innovator James Rushford continues to scrape the outer rim on ‘Turzets’, coughing alien text-to-speak voices into meditative piano phrases and tweezed electro-acoustic drones on the first side, then deconstructing medieval organ music on the flip, combining gusty archaic melodies with sci-fi tinted Yamaha CS-80 zips. Mind-boggling stuff – RIYL Oren Ambarchi, Sam Kidel, Jim O’Rourke or even OPN.Rushford has left an indelible mark on the experimental scene at large over the last few years, collaborating with Oren Ambarchi, Will Guthrie, crys cole, Graham Lambkin, Kassel Jager, Judith Hamann, Sam Dunscombe and Joe Talia, and sculpting a solo catalogue that’s as vitalizing as it is explorative. ‘Turzets’ sweeps up material that the composer-performer wrote and recorded while in residence at La Becque in Switzerland, and it’s some of the most mystifying gear he’s produced to date. The 16-minute ‘Fallaway Whisk’ is a chilly examination of hesitation in its many forms, Rushford approaches the subject matter with cautious inquisitiveness, allowing lopsided piano to root us in the real world, while the surrounding flock of digital belches sketch out a more complex universe just outside.

Using mutilated text-to-speech translations from English to German, Rushford gestures at linguistic uncertainty; the sounds aren’t easily decipherable – they’re words, just about, but mechanically altered so only blank expressions remain. These guttural hiccups punctuate the reluctant piano flourishes, bedded in woodwind puffs and cyber-industrial noise The faint blueprint of classic concrète is still in there somewhere, but Rushford moves forward forcefully, paying his respects but never succumbing to nostalgia. His processes are deliberate but deceptive – the pauses seem just as powerful as any deafening sonic rushes.

The ten-part ‘Quire’ peers further into the past to reach a similar speculative future. Here, Rushford prizes apart medieval music, using the portative organ we heard on 2022’s ace ‘Block Gifts’. Again, these resonant, liturgical recitations are disrupted by glassy, digital miaows and cackles that force us to reconsider exactly what it is we’re listening to. Nothing’s completely straightforward – even the relatively linear ‘Quire III’ is dimpled by cryptic treatments and pestilent voices that seem to prize the arpeggiated phrases apart at the seams. Intriguingly, Rushford offsets his pump organ sounds with sonorous analog sequences played on the Yamaha CS-80, the same synth Vangelis famously used to create the ‘Blade Runner’ score. On ‘Quire VII’, he mimics the organ with the synthesizer, wondering about its harmonies and dissonances but staying lodged in a liminal zone between historical fact and science fiction.

It’s material that’s not a million miles from Oneohtrix Point Never’s ‘Again’, but there’s no bombast here. Rushford makes links and draws parallels that aren’t always visible to the naked ear, weaving together short, sharp snippets into surreal sonic poems that keep revealing more with each subsequent listen.

Tracklist:

1-1. James Rushford – Fallaway Whisk (16:00)
1-2. James Rushford – Quire I (04:23)
1-3. James Rushford – Quire II (00:42)
1-4. James Rushford – Quire III (01:46)
1-5. James Rushford – Quire IV (01:11)
1-6. James Rushford – Quire V (00:18)
1-7. James Rushford – Quire VI (01:47)
1-8. James Rushford – Quire VII (02:38)
1-9. James Rushford – Quire VIII (00:31)
1-10. James Rushford – Quire IX (00:20)
1-11. James Rushford – Quire X (03:28)

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