So this is interesting. One moment I am listening to Rrose‘s Having Never Written a Note for Percussion, playing her custom-made 32-inch gong in an unused train tunnel beneath Dupont Circle in downtown Washington D.C., and a day later I am listening to Ida Toninato playing her baritone saxophone in Tank Center for Sonic Arts in Colorado, an immense former water treatment facility which has a massive 40-second long reverberation. Coincidence? I don’t think so. In both cases, the recorded performance is as much about the acoustics of the space and the interplay of its dynamics as it is about the minimal instrumentation used in exciting its resonance. But that’s where the similarities end since We Become Giants is not as droney as I expected it to be, especially on Yann Novak‘s minimalist ambient imprint, Dragon’s Eye Recordings. The composition is incredibly musical, aesthetically pleasing, and in some cases, borderline cinematic [even if you’re not a fan of the saxophone] with its deep bass rumbles, synthetic noise-driven ‘wind’ and post-processing effects added on by Toninato in her studio later. The whole album was developed with the analogy of a hallucination in which real and imaginary space are intertwined into a sonic, visceral trip.” Toninato explores the conjured sonics, dispersed harmonics, and naturally produced delay by playing along with the architecture and the medium of the Tank Center, which has, in turn, become another instrument. A fascinating listen, which reminds me a bit of Richard Chartier‘s Interior Field (Line, 2013), which was also recorded in one of the chambers of the McMillan underground sand filtration tanks, used to store overflow stormwater to prevent flooding.
— Headphone Commute