On The Silent Howl.

Tracklist:

1. Depths of the Nile
2. Sinai Desert
3. Empty City of the Full Moon
4. Old Marocco
5. The Forgotten Purpose
6. Wayward Exotism
7. Preveli Beach
8. Dubai Airways

9. City Full of Moon (Chad Mossholder of Twine remix)
10. Desert of the Nile (Daniel Ruane remix)

Untraditional Noise

tobias c. van Veen [lower­case please]

With Tradition Noise, Martijn Comes delves into the richness & riddim, texture &

ambiance of a musical history that is at once as kaleidoscopic as it is coherent. Without

hesitation, Comes sifts through the resonance of signifying sounds that shape his

relationship to archival tradition, mining the musical palimpsests that have, in his own

words, allowed him to “make sense” of his “cultural habitat.” But Comes’ habitat is

anything but a soundscape of habit; rather, his compositions embrace the cultural

fragmentation of his existence, reflecting influences as diverse as traditional rhythms from

Greece and the Middle East to his formal training in electroacoustic composition and

avant­garde electronics. On the one channel, Comes mines the techniques of

Plunderphonics developed by John Oswald, putting sampladelia to use in reconstructing

what has been into something strange yet again; on the other channel, Comes plunders

with the intent of sparking new universes of sound, composing apace with the imaginary

Fourth Worlds of Jon Hassell. Drawing from field recordings and found sound, Comes

manages to effortlessly shift style and structure without shattering his cosmos of

continuity. “Noise,” writes Comes, “is created as a neutraliser of ideas,” by “breaking the

old, creating something new.” But far from the outbursts of mind­destroying noisescapes

that form the static cliché of the genre, Comes embraces the “noise” of expressive

chance, as he shapes his musical fragments into speculative worlds that are as mercurial

as they are steadfast. Tradition Noise does not so much neutralise ideas as counterpoise

them, setting them up against each other in succession before blurring them in

speculative supercession. Comes, never content with what has been given, mines his

new musical alloys from the melting pot of former habits. As listeners, our minds become

free to imagine, once again, habitats unbound.