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It is in the minimal use of polyphony, harmony, melody, and other such conventional means of music that the extreme effect of space comes into the work. This spatial emptiness is the profound ‘coldness’ in Lab Report’s music. To realize that the artist forms his medium through the use of purely deviated and generally condemned sounds is to realize that the artist has no morality. In the ‘ethics of music’ Lab Report’s work is entirely criminal. Hence the inherent anxiety that is the foundation of the tones expressed and the tones distressed. But it is not just the sounds and tones that fully compose Lab Report’s work, the silence demands equal attention. It is the brilliant use of silences and reverberations that one becomes conscious of the physical space that surrounds the message. Reverb is shadow in the visual world of sound and reverb is emptiness in the material world of sound. Instead of creating a completely artificial atmosphere Lab Report bring us into the nakedness of sound and thus, into the nakedness of existence. This is the fundamental element of the work that I will call organic. This is pure sound cleansed of all pretense or cosmetic delusion. This is the music of Existentialism.|Another prevalent feeling to be found in the music is in the pathological detachment with which the sounds are created and executed. The almost arbitrary manner in which the sounds are made is secretly reminding us of the cruel and random workings of the universe which we so often credit with absolutely illusory order and meaning. In addition to this is the sterile impersonality that comes with a digital recording of this nature. The fear-invoking power of this is phlegmatic and emotionless way in which Lab Report display the horror that is existence. The environment they create is of calculated intensity: the generation of feedback as applied here is a naturally pressure-building phenomena. This anxiety in the music is physical and I cannot emphasize this point enough. The fear in the sound is certainly in relation to the heightened awareness of time that is implicit in these techniques of linear sound. we are confronted with an auditory paradigm that subliminally communicates the most primitive ideas: sound=space, space=time, time=life, life=death, this is only one of the innumerable possibilities. This is the confinement that we find.|Perhaps beyond, or at least in the immediate plane, the ascetic quality of Lab Report’s music lies in their depth of pure, tenebrous sound and atonal layering. Each piece is immersed in the organic vibrations of contiguous notes surrounded by the most subtle and quiet whines, loops, buzzing and other such phantom anti-harmonies. Of course ascetically Lab Report would seem predominately Dadaist in their ‘anti-ness’. The pure viscerally in atmosphere and ingenious manipulation of electronic sound make Lab Report’s music an honestly frightening study into space with all of it’s properties and images as well as primal Existentialism and all the austere truths and horrors therein. |
