Sound artist Lee Riley, perhaps best known for his past work as
Euhedral, has been increasingly active in recent years creating vast
swathes of sound armed with all manner of unorthodox (and often
self-made) instruments. For an artist whose recent experiments have
involved dragging a guitar through the streets of Oxford and “a piece
for bowed metal container and 16 pints of water,” the idea of a
stationary set of guitar noise might seem slightly pedestrian but Deeper
Steps Into the New Path is anything but. Recorded live at the Pegasus
Theatre in June, Deeper Steps… is – as its name suggests – an aural
journey, and, for an improvised work, an impressively well-crafted one
at that. Foreboding screeching notes that chime like exotic bird calls
give way to waves of overlapping white noise and deep, cavernous
sub-bass feedback, whilst reverberating echo and delay helps to create a
disorientating sense of pulsating rhythm throughout. A running
commentary for such an impressionistic piece of music would be fairly
pointless, suffice it to say that Lee has managed to create a soundscape
that is inviting, mysterious, and terrifying in equal measure, and one
that makes for a completely immersive experience.
[Originally published in Nightshift magazine, Issue 222, Jan 2014]
http://nightshift.oxfordmusic.net/2014/jan.pdf
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