Oakland-based sound artist Tana Sprague is Lissom. Behind the slinky pseudonym, she fashions Nest of Iterations, from a palette of sources – field-found, acoustic, synthetic; a mesh of recursive shapes and forms, patterns and processes, at once delicate and hefty, hermetic and engaging, con- and dis-sonant. Inspired by “the elegant complexity of organic forms,” the cover’s hive image offers a visual metaphor of its musical contents, an analogous enveloping intricacy being synthesized through deployment of a variety of electronic and digital strategies. Avowedly fixated with micro details, Sprague’s mission – to “manipulate awareness of time, space, place, and scale” – is achieved through the eponymous (re-)iterations. Like with the tape-loops of Riley and the phase-shift of Reich, it’s all about variation within repetition, micro-shift within sustain. Sprague is an advocate of a creed of simple ideas rendered complex through process – whether stochastic or deterministic. The result is a stratified space the listener can navigate, customizing focus from centre to periphery, macro to micro. With credentials both academic (studies in Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts) and professional (Assistant Director of RML, SF), Lissom’s no sound design slouch. Insidiously alluring surface structures are rent by strange streaks or suffer slippage – to teeming undertow, dissonant dives. Billows of hiss, tintinnabulations, and rumble wreathed in shadow and whispers tell the tale of “Fallow;” while “Forage” is forged with deep drones and crepitations, a scrim of antique vinyl and arcane reverberations, After these stifling dense tableaux, “Billow” and “Stark” open up to a wider horizon, more of the air and aether, finding felicitous encounter between ambient eras: a dose of Eno’s, a nightclass at the 12k school of Mssrs Deupree and Chartier, maybe a trip down the Köner shop.
– Alan Lockett