CatalogueArtist: Wyndel Hunt
Title: Sunshine Noir
Catalogue: de5027
Duration: 42:07
Format: CD-R
Edition: 250
Release: February 2010
BUY NOW
1. Sumud
2. The Drop
3. Invisible Hand revealed: Iron Fist
4. Deckle
5. Niche destroys Market
6. Plot Device
7. Sunshine Noir
8. Free Dissociation
Inside instantaneous openings of titanic surroundings and pinpointed views, with patchwork surroundings of silver, black, and grey, Wyndel Hunt's Sunshine Noir is in its length and breadth both streamlined with sharp contours and accented by the deep buzz of dissipative control.
Hunt’s fourth recording on Dragon’s Eye builds using attention to details and dynamic control in coordination with restraint and pattern-weaving; the sounds move toward a seemingly paradoxical goal of constructing disappearing monoliths of sound. Compositional methods referencing collage and descriptive phrases such as aural painting, sonic architecture and sculpture are apropos yet not exhaustive--the proportion and volume of the pieces combined with their sudden disappearances make them simultaneously tangible and elusive.
While epic proportions are kept in check with fuzzing, mechanical lines, some of the greatest moments in Sunshine Noir are where the sounds drop down below the edge of perceptibility--the subdued quality of the recording is enhanced in all the apparently empty spaces—making the moments where little more is left than a whisper where Sunshine Noir burns brightest.
Sunshine Noir was recorded throughout 2009 in Seattle, Washington, using only Ableton Live, Reason 2.5, a Casio MT-520 and a guitar. All tracks were composed by Wyndel Hunt, except 'Deckle', which was constructed by Christopher DeLaurenti. With this small arsenal of materials, the resulting compositions are an astounding achievement of sculpted geography allowing the listener to imagine the process of construction and its completion as a singular movement.
Reviews
At Data Breaker HQ, we like columns based on opposites—or at least those revolving around extremely disparate musical approaches. And that's what we have this week with two local musicians whose styles vastly differ. Wyndel Hunt focuses with impressive intensity on creating beatless soundscapes that aspire to a sort of mineral calm, yet upon scrutiny reveal hectic microscopic activity; Milkplant (aka Wisconsin transplant Justin Pennell), by contrast, toils in the trenches of darkest clubland techno, where beats are weapons and/or calls to action and lust. Each producer excels in his chosen sphere.
Let's start with Hunt. He records for Yann Novak's Dragon's Eye Recordings, the former Seattle/current L.A.–based stronghold of rarefied, often academically rigorous and field-recording-enhanced ambient music. Over four full-lengths, Hunt has produced enigmatic tracks that embrace qualities of both noise and tone poetry, abrasion and tranquility. His latest CD, Sunshine Noir, as the title implies, further hones his frequently paradoxical sound. The track "Invisible Hand Revealed: Iron Fist" begins with tidal shore lapping and the roar of a vacuum cleaner the size of a Boeing 787. It gradually builds in intensity until you feel as if you've entered a hangar in which hundreds of helicopters are idling. It's alarmingly exhilarating. On the other end of the spectrum, "Deckle" commingles insectoid mandible chatter with malfunctioning ancient computer emissions. "Niche Destroys Market" drifts down from the firmament with unspeakable delicacy until a chainsaw, a waterfall, and an orchestra waft into earshot. This piece reveals Hunt's mastery of subtle disorientation. Throughout Sunshine Noir, Hunt ripples your organ of Corti with fascinating granules of microcosmic sound. For the March 12 Chapel gig, Hunt says he will "be doing electroacoustic processing as well as just straight-up electronic variations in the mood/vein of Sunshine Noir."
– The Stranger
In the last couple of decades there’s been a parallel movement to harsh noise that is just as edgy and artful, but that directs its violence and focus inwards, like a meditation. The body is not attacked from outside, torn, and bound by industrial mechanization; rather, it is infiltrated by the mind and dissolved from within by its own processes. Subjected to this environment and enthralled by the logic of explanation, reason marches into itself alongside its technological apparatuses and blows up by contradiction, by denying the body in which it resides. The result of this apparent assassination (the most terrible of crimes) is perhaps a superior state of consciousness - illumination, an ominous Sunshine Noir.
Like Axolotl’s Telesma, this album wields electronics in all their possible iterations: as noise, as drone, as walls-of-sound, as experiments as much as melodic companions. There’s four tools used by Wyndel Hunt to generate these sounds. While there’s a guitar in the mix, it matters little, because the sounds are all fully integrated into the artist’s persona, inseparable and organically fitted into a meaning-producing machine that works its way into the final performance of the aforementioned crime. What does matter is the way in which this machine operates, taking clear cues from Tim Hecker’s An Imaginary Country as much as from any of Xela’s work, driving all those electronics through a filter of ambient to form a product that is expansive, hypnotizing, passively intense, and powerful. Thankfully, one of the pieces of evidence in the crime scene is a subtle trace of humor, a playful sensibility that gets to make fun of everything that is serious in this production. A “Plot Device,” nearing the end of the album, advances the non-narrative somewhere via small, happy-sounding bits of melody that reminds this listener of something almost New Age sounding. And where could we locate all this ‘meditation’ and ‘inward’ thing if not directly related to both genuine and money-grabbing New Age?
The fun, of course, does not end there, and we are immediately treated with a blast of drone in the form of “Sunshine Noir” itself, an electronically generated chant that seems perpetual and immanent as much as it feels transient when it starts to fade out, or when our attentions start to center on the little, almost inaudible bits of noisy intervention scattered all along the drone. By the ending’s silence, the murder has been effected. With no logic and reason remaining to organize and classify reality in order to solve it, we’re thrown into the final track. “Free Dissociation” walks us right into nowhere, into imaginary countries and fantastic, never-before-felt sentiments and experiences.
While this is surely the most enjoyable time I’ve had in the electronic music since Tim Hecker’s or Axolotl’s work, Sunshine Noir is not as well-structured as theirs and can be found either faltering or actually better (depending on one's judgment), just because the narrative it mocks is very present and yet seems too disperse in the beginning. One could think that I’m just falling into the trap of reason, and while maybe I am, it still feels as if the album is truly unfocused at times. In any case, fans of any of the artists mentioned need apply, as well as anyone who is looking for a solid, interesting entrance into the world of electronic music experimentalism.
–The Silent Ballet
Sunshine Noir, Wyndel Hunt's fourth recording on Dragon's Eye, wastes no time at all in making its point: from the first second of “Sumud,” the material seethes with a controlled fury which, in this case, translates into a roar that suggests an up-close recording of a 747 engine. Overtones jostle for position within the buzzing drone until the track's abrupt cessation re-acquaints the listener with silence for a moment before “The Drop” fires up its slightly less overdriven machinery for a relatively calming two minutes. Foir the record, Hunt recorded Sunshine Noir in 2009 in Seattle, Washington using Ableton Live, Reason 2.5, a Casio MT-520, and a guitar to generate the album's eight monoliths.
In “Plot Device,” the buzz of electrical wires threatens to engulf the listener, but the mood shifts, alternating between that droning buzz and warmer washes that seem rapturous by comparison. Hunt shows himself here in particular to be remarkably deft at shaping the material and in oscillating from one passage to another. A palpable sense of threat pervades certain pieces, with the listener bracing him/herself for detonations he/she is never sure will in fact arrive. One example is “Niche Destroys Market,” which escalates from an intro of quiet textural loops into a fierce monstrosity that, nearing its peak, shorts out; the aptly titled title track opts for slow, incremental build as it swells in magnitude, becoming a black hole of ecstatic design in the process, but it too steps back from the precipice at its loudest moment to ease the listener out. Even when Hunt opts for the epic and blustery (e.g., “Invisible Hand Revealed: Iron Fist,” “Free Dissociation”), the material never feels like it's splintering out of control, with Hunt bringing the same care to modulating the intensity and dynamic levels within the louder settings as he does the quieter. If there's an anomolous moment, it's “Deckle,” whose two minutes of bleeps and flutter sounds somewhat out of character with the rest of the album, but that's probably attributable to the fact that the piece was constructed by Christopher DeLaurenti, not Hunt. Though there is a noise dimension to Hunt's work, it would be more accurate to label it sound-sculpting. What makes it more accessible is that its contours are smooth, not jagged, and so while the material may often be loud, it's not abrasive.
– Textura
And finally Wyndel Hunt returns with Sunshine Noir, a new skin for his old ceremony of integrating melody and noise using electronics, acoustic instruments, field recordings, and the occasional piece of amplified trash (his words). His work is articulated in terms of a focus on 'conceiving narrative, painting, and sculpture as analogues for structuring composition and shaping sound'. Compositional techniques referencing collage and aural painting, sonic sculpture are de rigueur. On this his fourth recording for DE Hunt's edifices strain towards the steepling but their forms are constantly under threat of crumbling and combusting. Its eight pieces roll out the drones, riding on a storm of digi-pointillism, buffeted by soft-noise eddies, the eponymous elements manifesting in the MBV-distilled blasts of fuzz-tone buzz-drone sunshine of its surface and a certain core of dark and danger at its noir heart. Exhibit A: "Free Dissociation," wherein Hunt’s ga(u)ze takes in Tim Hecker and Fennesz as he surveys the field of sound between delicacy and brutality, between pitched and unpitched, like a landscape painter wracked by visitations from a Pollockian paint-spattering spirit; sometimes a scuffed and fissured Pop Ambient notion - lyrical drift with edges frayed by the digi-noise-nik.
– Furthernoise
No reference points: An entirely new musical territory.
Drumroll forever. Just one chord, seemingly sustained into infinity. The moment you get used to it and try to figure out the sonic nuances, they immediately fade away before you can come to any conclusions. And then there is an abrupt ending. Someone just pulled the plug. Nothing... just a momentous and overpowering silence... it almost hurts, and its name is „Sumud“.
Wyndel Hunt is a master of loops, and that is just what he's demonstrating on this CD. Within his creations, there is sometimes no more than a single theme, a harmony that is nothing but pure sound. It’s pushing through the piece in varying degrees of loudness, chiming with electronically created timbres that once in a while rise to the fore only to fade away again. But even then, they remain forever present in the background.
And that’s not all: Once can distinctly perceive percussion, almost cosmic and intergalactic refrains, telling unknown tales of civilizations living far, far away. Or what is it…? The sounds seemingly creep into your imagination, taking possession of your brain and the resources one have stored right there only to find that there is nothing comparable yet… No reference points… no prior experiences… this is an entirely new musical terrain with unknown valleys, oceans, mountains and prairies that need to be discovered. It really is so alien that at a first listen, a constant reflection sets in, a kind of a control mechanism, that can’t be stopped or switched off. Occasionally, a track will drift back into familiar territory. But a mere second later, all sounds effortlessly turn around and hitchhike back into an unexplored wilderness.
Hunt has arrived at a powerful work for sonic purists and a carefully crafted piece of art. Personally, I felt as though an element of poetry were missing from these tracks. Then again, maybe is doesn’t even have a rightful place here. And I will certainly not abate the album by insisting on my personal preferences. Besides, quite a few listeners have already arrived at different conclusions. What matters in the end is that „Sunshine Noire“ has ended up a work that truly caters to a nostalgic ideal: That there can still be such a thing as „new music“.
– Tokafi
A new work by Wyndel Hunt, who has previously released on this label, both solo and in collaboration with Thom Heileson. Unlike before we now get to know what he uses: Ableton live, Reason 2.5, Casio MT-520 and a guitar. When I called this 'computerized blissful drones' in Vital Weekly 577, I wasn't off the mark. This is what he did, and still does. In the eight pieces here he creates a form of drone music that is 'louder', more 'present' than many of his peers. Sounds swell and decay like all good drone music, but it seems he needs less time to do so than many others. The music is fuzzy, like a shoegazing form of laptop music. In such cases I am supposed to say that its a pity there hasn't been much progress since the previous release, but its also not a matter of over-production I guess, which is also a nice thing. Its fine to have music that is away the typical ambient glitch sound (that is sometimes also loudly present in this label's catalogue) and is something of his own. Again the pieces that are more collage like are a bit stronger, but I must say that throughout this is a highly pleasant work.
– Vital Weekly
<< Back
Title: Sunshine Noir
Catalogue: de5027
Duration: 42:07
Format: CD-R
Edition: 250
Release: February 2010
BUY NOW
1. Sumud
2. The Drop
3. Invisible Hand revealed: Iron Fist
4. Deckle
5. Niche destroys Market
6. Plot Device
7. Sunshine Noir
8. Free Dissociation
Inside instantaneous openings of titanic surroundings and pinpointed views, with patchwork surroundings of silver, black, and grey, Wyndel Hunt's Sunshine Noir is in its length and breadth both streamlined with sharp contours and accented by the deep buzz of dissipative control.
Hunt’s fourth recording on Dragon’s Eye builds using attention to details and dynamic control in coordination with restraint and pattern-weaving; the sounds move toward a seemingly paradoxical goal of constructing disappearing monoliths of sound. Compositional methods referencing collage and descriptive phrases such as aural painting, sonic architecture and sculpture are apropos yet not exhaustive--the proportion and volume of the pieces combined with their sudden disappearances make them simultaneously tangible and elusive.
While epic proportions are kept in check with fuzzing, mechanical lines, some of the greatest moments in Sunshine Noir are where the sounds drop down below the edge of perceptibility--the subdued quality of the recording is enhanced in all the apparently empty spaces—making the moments where little more is left than a whisper where Sunshine Noir burns brightest.
Sunshine Noir was recorded throughout 2009 in Seattle, Washington, using only Ableton Live, Reason 2.5, a Casio MT-520 and a guitar. All tracks were composed by Wyndel Hunt, except 'Deckle', which was constructed by Christopher DeLaurenti. With this small arsenal of materials, the resulting compositions are an astounding achievement of sculpted geography allowing the listener to imagine the process of construction and its completion as a singular movement.
Reviews
At Data Breaker HQ, we like columns based on opposites—or at least those revolving around extremely disparate musical approaches. And that's what we have this week with two local musicians whose styles vastly differ. Wyndel Hunt focuses with impressive intensity on creating beatless soundscapes that aspire to a sort of mineral calm, yet upon scrutiny reveal hectic microscopic activity; Milkplant (aka Wisconsin transplant Justin Pennell), by contrast, toils in the trenches of darkest clubland techno, where beats are weapons and/or calls to action and lust. Each producer excels in his chosen sphere.
Let's start with Hunt. He records for Yann Novak's Dragon's Eye Recordings, the former Seattle/current L.A.–based stronghold of rarefied, often academically rigorous and field-recording-enhanced ambient music. Over four full-lengths, Hunt has produced enigmatic tracks that embrace qualities of both noise and tone poetry, abrasion and tranquility. His latest CD, Sunshine Noir, as the title implies, further hones his frequently paradoxical sound. The track "Invisible Hand Revealed: Iron Fist" begins with tidal shore lapping and the roar of a vacuum cleaner the size of a Boeing 787. It gradually builds in intensity until you feel as if you've entered a hangar in which hundreds of helicopters are idling. It's alarmingly exhilarating. On the other end of the spectrum, "Deckle" commingles insectoid mandible chatter with malfunctioning ancient computer emissions. "Niche Destroys Market" drifts down from the firmament with unspeakable delicacy until a chainsaw, a waterfall, and an orchestra waft into earshot. This piece reveals Hunt's mastery of subtle disorientation. Throughout Sunshine Noir, Hunt ripples your organ of Corti with fascinating granules of microcosmic sound. For the March 12 Chapel gig, Hunt says he will "be doing electroacoustic processing as well as just straight-up electronic variations in the mood/vein of Sunshine Noir."
– The Stranger
In the last couple of decades there’s been a parallel movement to harsh noise that is just as edgy and artful, but that directs its violence and focus inwards, like a meditation. The body is not attacked from outside, torn, and bound by industrial mechanization; rather, it is infiltrated by the mind and dissolved from within by its own processes. Subjected to this environment and enthralled by the logic of explanation, reason marches into itself alongside its technological apparatuses and blows up by contradiction, by denying the body in which it resides. The result of this apparent assassination (the most terrible of crimes) is perhaps a superior state of consciousness - illumination, an ominous Sunshine Noir.
Like Axolotl’s Telesma, this album wields electronics in all their possible iterations: as noise, as drone, as walls-of-sound, as experiments as much as melodic companions. There’s four tools used by Wyndel Hunt to generate these sounds. While there’s a guitar in the mix, it matters little, because the sounds are all fully integrated into the artist’s persona, inseparable and organically fitted into a meaning-producing machine that works its way into the final performance of the aforementioned crime. What does matter is the way in which this machine operates, taking clear cues from Tim Hecker’s An Imaginary Country as much as from any of Xela’s work, driving all those electronics through a filter of ambient to form a product that is expansive, hypnotizing, passively intense, and powerful. Thankfully, one of the pieces of evidence in the crime scene is a subtle trace of humor, a playful sensibility that gets to make fun of everything that is serious in this production. A “Plot Device,” nearing the end of the album, advances the non-narrative somewhere via small, happy-sounding bits of melody that reminds this listener of something almost New Age sounding. And where could we locate all this ‘meditation’ and ‘inward’ thing if not directly related to both genuine and money-grabbing New Age?
The fun, of course, does not end there, and we are immediately treated with a blast of drone in the form of “Sunshine Noir” itself, an electronically generated chant that seems perpetual and immanent as much as it feels transient when it starts to fade out, or when our attentions start to center on the little, almost inaudible bits of noisy intervention scattered all along the drone. By the ending’s silence, the murder has been effected. With no logic and reason remaining to organize and classify reality in order to solve it, we’re thrown into the final track. “Free Dissociation” walks us right into nowhere, into imaginary countries and fantastic, never-before-felt sentiments and experiences.
While this is surely the most enjoyable time I’ve had in the electronic music since Tim Hecker’s or Axolotl’s work, Sunshine Noir is not as well-structured as theirs and can be found either faltering or actually better (depending on one's judgment), just because the narrative it mocks is very present and yet seems too disperse in the beginning. One could think that I’m just falling into the trap of reason, and while maybe I am, it still feels as if the album is truly unfocused at times. In any case, fans of any of the artists mentioned need apply, as well as anyone who is looking for a solid, interesting entrance into the world of electronic music experimentalism.
–The Silent Ballet
Sunshine Noir, Wyndel Hunt's fourth recording on Dragon's Eye, wastes no time at all in making its point: from the first second of “Sumud,” the material seethes with a controlled fury which, in this case, translates into a roar that suggests an up-close recording of a 747 engine. Overtones jostle for position within the buzzing drone until the track's abrupt cessation re-acquaints the listener with silence for a moment before “The Drop” fires up its slightly less overdriven machinery for a relatively calming two minutes. Foir the record, Hunt recorded Sunshine Noir in 2009 in Seattle, Washington using Ableton Live, Reason 2.5, a Casio MT-520, and a guitar to generate the album's eight monoliths.
In “Plot Device,” the buzz of electrical wires threatens to engulf the listener, but the mood shifts, alternating between that droning buzz and warmer washes that seem rapturous by comparison. Hunt shows himself here in particular to be remarkably deft at shaping the material and in oscillating from one passage to another. A palpable sense of threat pervades certain pieces, with the listener bracing him/herself for detonations he/she is never sure will in fact arrive. One example is “Niche Destroys Market,” which escalates from an intro of quiet textural loops into a fierce monstrosity that, nearing its peak, shorts out; the aptly titled title track opts for slow, incremental build as it swells in magnitude, becoming a black hole of ecstatic design in the process, but it too steps back from the precipice at its loudest moment to ease the listener out. Even when Hunt opts for the epic and blustery (e.g., “Invisible Hand Revealed: Iron Fist,” “Free Dissociation”), the material never feels like it's splintering out of control, with Hunt bringing the same care to modulating the intensity and dynamic levels within the louder settings as he does the quieter. If there's an anomolous moment, it's “Deckle,” whose two minutes of bleeps and flutter sounds somewhat out of character with the rest of the album, but that's probably attributable to the fact that the piece was constructed by Christopher DeLaurenti, not Hunt. Though there is a noise dimension to Hunt's work, it would be more accurate to label it sound-sculpting. What makes it more accessible is that its contours are smooth, not jagged, and so while the material may often be loud, it's not abrasive.
– Textura
And finally Wyndel Hunt returns with Sunshine Noir, a new skin for his old ceremony of integrating melody and noise using electronics, acoustic instruments, field recordings, and the occasional piece of amplified trash (his words). His work is articulated in terms of a focus on 'conceiving narrative, painting, and sculpture as analogues for structuring composition and shaping sound'. Compositional techniques referencing collage and aural painting, sonic sculpture are de rigueur. On this his fourth recording for DE Hunt's edifices strain towards the steepling but their forms are constantly under threat of crumbling and combusting. Its eight pieces roll out the drones, riding on a storm of digi-pointillism, buffeted by soft-noise eddies, the eponymous elements manifesting in the MBV-distilled blasts of fuzz-tone buzz-drone sunshine of its surface and a certain core of dark and danger at its noir heart. Exhibit A: "Free Dissociation," wherein Hunt’s ga(u)ze takes in Tim Hecker and Fennesz as he surveys the field of sound between delicacy and brutality, between pitched and unpitched, like a landscape painter wracked by visitations from a Pollockian paint-spattering spirit; sometimes a scuffed and fissured Pop Ambient notion - lyrical drift with edges frayed by the digi-noise-nik.
– Furthernoise
No reference points: An entirely new musical territory.
Drumroll forever. Just one chord, seemingly sustained into infinity. The moment you get used to it and try to figure out the sonic nuances, they immediately fade away before you can come to any conclusions. And then there is an abrupt ending. Someone just pulled the plug. Nothing... just a momentous and overpowering silence... it almost hurts, and its name is „Sumud“.
Wyndel Hunt is a master of loops, and that is just what he's demonstrating on this CD. Within his creations, there is sometimes no more than a single theme, a harmony that is nothing but pure sound. It’s pushing through the piece in varying degrees of loudness, chiming with electronically created timbres that once in a while rise to the fore only to fade away again. But even then, they remain forever present in the background.
And that’s not all: Once can distinctly perceive percussion, almost cosmic and intergalactic refrains, telling unknown tales of civilizations living far, far away. Or what is it…? The sounds seemingly creep into your imagination, taking possession of your brain and the resources one have stored right there only to find that there is nothing comparable yet… No reference points… no prior experiences… this is an entirely new musical terrain with unknown valleys, oceans, mountains and prairies that need to be discovered. It really is so alien that at a first listen, a constant reflection sets in, a kind of a control mechanism, that can’t be stopped or switched off. Occasionally, a track will drift back into familiar territory. But a mere second later, all sounds effortlessly turn around and hitchhike back into an unexplored wilderness.
Hunt has arrived at a powerful work for sonic purists and a carefully crafted piece of art. Personally, I felt as though an element of poetry were missing from these tracks. Then again, maybe is doesn’t even have a rightful place here. And I will certainly not abate the album by insisting on my personal preferences. Besides, quite a few listeners have already arrived at different conclusions. What matters in the end is that „Sunshine Noire“ has ended up a work that truly caters to a nostalgic ideal: That there can still be such a thing as „new music“.
– Tokafi
A new work by Wyndel Hunt, who has previously released on this label, both solo and in collaboration with Thom Heileson. Unlike before we now get to know what he uses: Ableton live, Reason 2.5, Casio MT-520 and a guitar. When I called this 'computerized blissful drones' in Vital Weekly 577, I wasn't off the mark. This is what he did, and still does. In the eight pieces here he creates a form of drone music that is 'louder', more 'present' than many of his peers. Sounds swell and decay like all good drone music, but it seems he needs less time to do so than many others. The music is fuzzy, like a shoegazing form of laptop music. In such cases I am supposed to say that its a pity there hasn't been much progress since the previous release, but its also not a matter of over-production I guess, which is also a nice thing. Its fine to have music that is away the typical ambient glitch sound (that is sometimes also loudly present in this label's catalogue) and is something of his own. Again the pieces that are more collage like are a bit stronger, but I must say that throughout this is a highly pleasant work.
– Vital Weekly
<< Back
de5027
Sumud
Plot Device
Free Dissociation
SumudPlot Device
Free Dissociation