Thanks to Yann Novak, Manny Rettinger, Chris Shultis.


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Reviews

The poise and concentrated quietude of Steve Peters on these pieces elevates tiny, random sounds into a hushed symphony of chance. Resonant frequencies between 70hz and 3khz rise out of rooms as though from nothingness and are recombined in the kind of disordered and associative manner that often accompanies intense grief.

The rooms are first seen careening in a crepuscalar atmosphere flecked with feint glottals and lulling cadences whose echoes lift them into surprisingly experssive, multiphonic pieces. In this sense, Peter's starts one off at the climax of a slow motion ceremony and afterwards leaves the listener to dwell in the aeons between. The listener is henceforth brought into high-pitched, flickering tones flirting around a full-bodied drone of considerable harmonic subtlety or intricately sliding microtonal inflections and almost hymnic cadences suggestive of the il y a.

It's none to hard to form a sympathetic relation with this work: it not only quite ingeniously demonstrates how one is always already in communication with the world owing to one's sense organs, but also how objects in the sensory field already harbor the opacity of a primary past.
– Earlabs


This composition, like the entire "chamber music" series by Steve Peters, originates exclusively from resonances extracted from empty spaces and rooms set to host site-specific sound installations. "Filtered light" was born from recordings of fourteen frequencies between 70 Hz and 3 kHz taken out of the University of New Mexico Art Museum, subdivided in 32 segments which "recombined randomly" in a four-channel setting. The composer recommends low playback volume for best results, and I definitely concur. This is first-rate backdrop music following ambient principles but also suitable for active listening, made of hardly traceable movements requiring silence, or at least a quiet environment, to be carefully valued in their unassuming wealth of gradations. Developing in an uninterrupted fluctuation one moment, in slightly uneven chiaroscuros the next, this billowing accumulation of processed whispers is just what the doctor ordered for concentrated absorption, his gentle touch on mental strain a much welcome break amidst pressuring circumstances. Peters, whose connection with "place, presence, perception, attention and duration" is way deeper than the average in a world of latecomers, is the holder of an exemplary and infrequently paralleled sympathy, which translates into psychological repercussion even in view of an apparently frail structural foundation.
– Touching Extremes


Steve Peters caters to a notion of arch minimalism that just about paints all the form’s classic composers as frauds. Filtered Light doesn’t use instruments, analog, digital or otherwise, at all; organized at site-specific installations, Peters’ sounds are gleaned from both the empty gallery room he’s situated in and incidental noises emitted from the building itself; the resulting resonant frequencies are subsequently equalized and subtly “mixed.” Across this work’s hour-long span are numerous supersonic tones punctuated by basal hums, alien vibrations, drizzles, and drips, unidentifiable tints and tinctures; Peters draws many a will o’ the wisp out of the site’s physical body in a extraordinarily revealing display of a “living structure” bursting with sound. A superb piece of aural solipsism that’ll drive lesser talents to deep-six their synths and shutter their studios.
– Signal to Noise


From an empty art museum in New Mexico, Seattle sound artist Steve Peters managed to extract fourteen frequencies between 70Hz and 3Hz in a single, hour-long recording. The hour was divided into over thirty segments and then recombined for this, one of the many sets of possible combinations that could have derived from the original four channel installation. No people were present for the recording. The only sounds are those that incidental to the building and have been processed and equalized to obtain the tones represented here on this limited run CD-R.

The idea that you could take one room’s resonance and relocate it to your own or anyone else’s is one that I’ve always loved and this could very well be the height of such a concept. Nothing but the room’s ambience, processed and re-programmed to highlight your own room’s surrounding sounds. Spooky resonance is interwoven with clear, wavering tones that feel strange but almost right when sat against each other. At times they sound anything but organic, as much as the label’s original idea for the project would have you believe. The overall feel of this recorded room is cold, white and empty with maybe a shadow of light-blue moonlight in the furthermost corner. Its gives the sense of making slightly disconcerted about being in your own space, as if the original building’s secret ghosts, its endless tales of long-disappeared builders, visitors and occupiers might have carried through onto disc. It is, of course, recommended for low playback so that any such spirits might not bet given a chance to haunt the corners of your own room. Just the space between your ears and the sound.
– Cyclic Defrost Magazine


Explorer of acoustic phenomena, Steve Peters, has conceived a new take on chamber music. It's not Music for Chambers but by chambers - the empty rooms in which his installations are exhibited being miked and milked for liminal ambient resonances. Sounds from empty rooms are minimally manipulated and then recycled. Peters' pieces are presented under the banner of being "primarily engaged with issues of place, presence, perception, attention, and duration." The sceptic might dismiss this as art-bollocks, and, sure, there ain't nothing like a smarty-pants artistic mission statement to provide a smokescreen behind which the artist-onanist can legitimate indulgence of a solipsistic habit. This is not intended as criticism of Peters in particular, but fair warning should be given that just as the presence of academic-art music is announced by its textual accompaniment, so within the first few minutes of Filtered Light all but the most intrepid of listening explorers will likely find themselves "engaged with issues" of their own in the face of such musically challenging - and challenged - work.

So let academic material be given sympathetic academic treatment. Materials: University of New Mexico Art Museum. Spartan slivers of ambient airwave-forms, drawn only from the life of the room itself or leakage from outside. Method: fourteen filtered frequencies are turned to thirty-two and rearranged randomly. Results: simple placid flows of pitched sonorities of relatively unassuming texturality emerge, spend time just being there individually, sometimes rubbing up against each other. Discussion: The rooms' inarticulate speech seems to struggle towards theme and rheme in the in-between of two frequencies, as long thin prosaic sustains are punctuated by essays at poetic detail - virtual marimba-esque water drops, sonar spectra, and some dot-dash dot-dash dot-dash. The low-event nature of the provisions demands that the listener make more of a meal of it, actively constructing his/her own Music of the Walls. Conclusion: each will then make of this what they will - the connections and disjunctions of Peters' material may be served up into an individual meaty micro-feast or, equally, may induce fast. It is interesting to note that both were experienced here, and in successive plays.
– Igloo Magazine


This is literally chamber music - sound artist Steve Peters records the ambient resonances of empty rooms, which he then turns into site-specific installations exhibited in the same locations. The latent acoustic potential of the space is brought out into a more tangible form. Filtered Light is based on an hour recording, which Peters filters into 14 frequencies, cuts into sections and then scrambles into a different order and mix. For the most part, stony sonorities are all that can be heard: long, looming tones that unfold incredibly slowly. But, like BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa's collaboration, these are broken by moments of vivid detail: sounds like dropping water, or the soft report of a sonar, gather adn disperse, apparently randomly - though after a while they almost recall Morse code. Perhaps as some philosophers speculate, matter is conscious after all and these streams of sound are incomprehensible coded messages coming through the walls and floor of Peter's chosen site.
– The Wire


Chamber Music’ is an ongoing series of site-specific sound installations that consist in recordings of empty rooms in which the work is exhibited. Silence becomes a sound source for part four of this installation. The sounds are of the building itself or the ones that come from outside, these tones are processed and no instruments are used. Peters used for ‘Filtered Light’ a one hour recording and selected fourteen frequencies between 70Hz and 3 KHz which were randomly combined. The result is the interaction of these frequencies which adopt a special shape depending of the space used. Sustain drones and drops of sparkle microsounds unfold over the whole album.
– Loop


One possible cycle of thirty-two segments: Subcutaneously active music played by a Museum.

As a schoolboy, I found it hard to believe that an absolute vacuum was nothing but a theoretical construct, which could never be attained in practise (except maybe, in the equally hard to imagine state of complete timelessness the potential universe might have rested in before exploding into life and a singularity through the big bang): What was the problem in sucking out a couple of atoms from underneath a glass dome? As Steve Peters shows on „Filtered Light“, this phenomenon is however by no means exclusive to the world of chemistry or astrophysics. Sound, too, hides in the tiniest of corners and chinks of the acoustic world.

You can therefore see this album as the result of musical research and of a child-like question: What sounds remain inside an empty room? The various volumes of Peters ongoing series of „Chamber Music“ works are site-specific answers to that issue, concretised through the unique characteristics of different spatial surroundings. Sensitive microphones are left behind as silent pairs of impartial ears, picking up discreet frequencies and the remainders of whatever microscopic noises may have trickled in through the backdoor. Augmented to the audible part of the spectrum, these ambient tones are not source material for further processing or composing – they represent the actual music.

Peters is therefore not so much extending an invitation to listen more closely to what surrounds us. Rather, his pieces bring out the harmony and dissonance, the melodies and motives as well as the continous tones subtely permeating the air at all times. The terminology of his „Chamber Music“ was not chosen to stress the proximity of his intimate electronic soundscapes to a classical tradition of concertising within a circle of friends, but to mark a pronounced difference to the ambient concept of Brian Eno: This is not music intended for subliminal consumption in specific rooms, it is subcutaneously active music played by the room itself.

„Filtered Light“ is the most recent volume of this approach and sees Peters applying his technique to the University of New Mexico Art Museum. On this occasion, he filtered out fourteen frequencies between 70 Hz and 3 kHz from a one-hour long recording. This track was then chopped up into thirty-two scenes, which were in turn rearranged randomly during the installation. The album therefore constitutes one possible cycle of all thirty-two segments and by no means a definite interpretation.

It was by no means clear that Peters methods would result in a drone work. Calmly and majestically, structures of harmonics and deep resonance ripple and breathe, billow and ebb, contracting the space around the listener, while simultaneously revealing the majesty and splendour of the rooms they were culled from. Little themes form in the friction area between two frequencies, running ever so slightly out of sync and at different speeds, sparking tender melodies from the void. It is a music of great, unmeditated harmony, of structures forming constantly like icicles on a window pane. Every instant is closely connected to the preceeding one, but completely different all the same.

Fascinatingly, there are also moments of concrete tonality, of reverbed marimba-like instruments playing silently. Isolated, they have the appearance of interludes in between the stretched-out dronescapes, but sometimes, the two overlap, creating the impression as though a speck of dust were sailing slowly and quietly through the room in hypnotic slowmotion.

„Filtered Light“ is a work both capable of being appreciated as absolute music and of projecting mental images – without doubt a quality intended by the composer, as spatial and acoustic characteristics are closely connected on this effort: There is a neverending cosmos of sound surrounding us.

It also raises questions, which I, for one, would find interesting to be followed up upon: Could this cosmos of sound possibly be influencing our perception like pheromones? Can rearranging a room, for example through Feng Shui, influence its subliminal sound? Most importantly, however, it challenges our view of the world like school experiments did my view of of the vacuum: There is no such thing as complete silence, no matter how hard you may try.
– Tokafi


Sound installation is enjoying a boom period currently, as many sound workers explore all of its elements and ramifications, the depth of ingenuity at times is quite astounding. Peters’ work here is formed from distillations of sound gleaned from room atmospherics, with no additional instrumentation or manipulation, it becomes an eerie document of the minutiae of sounds and reverberations spilling from empty spaces, with additional input coming from sounds that breach the space from outside. Peters slices fragments of these reverberations into layers of frequency, and uses this material as the fabric of his work.

Each piece isolates and dissects sounds which are then gated and equalised, with little or no additional processing. What emerges is a spare, yet highly charged soundscape, with subtle tonal shifts and incursions. Filtered Light is part of a series called Chamber Music that explores empty spaces, and indeed Peters work engages with issues of place, presence, perception, attention and duration. I would also add memory to that list, as many places actively “record” the events contained within them, and in Filtered Light, Peters has released these sounds , placing them under a microscope for further analysis. Given the economy of means at his disposal, Peters has bootstrapped a fine work into existence, using the sonic DNA of a building to form a cerebral and intensely engaging piece. Highly recommended.
– White_Line


Part four in an ongoing series of site-specific sound installations 'derived from recordings of the empty rooms in which the work is exhibited'. Here it's the turn of Steve Peters, whom we know through his releases on his own Nonsequitur as well as for other labels. Sitting in an empty room is something we hardly do of course, filled as they are with furniture, music and activity. But should you have the possibility to listen to empty spaces than you would realize there is a lot to hear. Peters recorded the room for an hour and selected fourteen frequencies between 70Hz an 3Khz. The hour was divided into thirty-two segments of varying length, played at random on a four channel installation. As such that what we get here is just one possible interaction of this. Cut as one track, leaving no room for us to further randomize the event, this is an absolute great piece of music. Very microsound of course, but things move around, change color, change shape and keep evolving throughout the course of the piece. Music to be played in a full room, sit back, relax and enjoy. It's very much a Brian Eno piece updated to today's technology. What else can I say? Simply gorgeous.
– Vital Weekly


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