- Intricate synthetic landscapes emerge on an IDM record that moves from the micro to the macro.
- If Thessa Torsing wasn't a DJ and producer, she told Bandcamp Daily, then she'd be a landscape architect. Luckily, she hasn't quit her day job, but her love for design sneaks into her records. Starting with 2019's mini-album Wild Chamber, she's used her full-lengths to move away from the club and towards experiments in sound design. The bedrock—electro and techno—is still there, but the tracks are built like hyper-detailed topographies, where bright melodies and synthesizer bleeps mix with the occasional field recording. Her music is like those ships constructed in bottles, each song so full of nuances it feels impossible that they could all be contained in the glass shell of a single track. Her latest album, Germ In A Population Of Buildings, condenses all this into a kaleidoscope of IDM, whirling vocals and polyrhythmic drums, with ten tracks clocking in at under 34 minutes.
The drums on the LP remind me of Autechre during their Tri Repetae through LP5 era, where the rhythms became simultaneously more minimalist and more complex. Torsing's drums are just as elaborate. Both "Patterning" and "Constructing" could be UK techno—as rhythmically playful as a Timedance release—but the percussion is so quiet that it feels like the rhythm might disappear at any moment. She expands the aperture on a track like "Asphalt Flows," where she leads with the percussion, but the drums don't sound like drums. Instead, it's almost like an Objekt track put together from samples of kitchen utensils, flowing water and shoes scraping cement.
Jumping between the loud and the quiet, Torsing also plays with a number of other scales on Germ In A Population Of Building. On the one hand, "Green Lung" unfolds with barely perceptible changes in the melody and a fractal drum loop that keeps shifting in ways that are almost too faint to clock. But if "Green Lung" is practically microscopic, the title track moves dramatically outwards into the far reaches of the cosmos. With such little weight in the low-end, the icy chords and chilling lead seem to echo across the soundscape indefinitely.
Like her excellent 2020 album, Zoom, the sonic palette here is colourful, though the mood is melancholy. The closing suite, in particular, seems to evoke an overriding sense of sadness. Once you get past the abrasive machine gun snare on "Soft Sand," the track's second half becomes a wistful elegy with its undulating chords and her auto-tuned vocals. On "Square To Sphere," Torsing trades the start-and-stop jerk of the rest of the record for a more gradual rhythmic lilt accented by a wistful lead line.
Listening to the album, I kept thinking of a famous short film from the '70s called Powers Of Ten, about orders of magnitude, where each shot expands the initial frame by a field by ten. We start with a close-up of a couple, then pivot out to the city, which then gets lost to the world, the world lost to the universe, and so forth. The film has been critiqued for imagining a world where shifting perspective is just a matter of zooming in or out. Germ In A Population Of Buildings is also concerned with questions of scale and perspective, but approaches them from a different angle. Even the album's title hints at this—what does it mean to be something as small as a germ against the backdrop of buildings? Torsing moves from the micro to the macro, the big to the small, the near to the far, but her modulations in perspective aren't smooth or seamless. Instead, Torsing draws our attention to the inherent weirdness and messiness of moving through space, no matter the scale.
Tracklist01. Being Is A Stone
02. Constructing
03. Ergo Dynamic Tree
04. Green Lung
05. Germ In A Population Of Buildings
06. Patterning
07. Asphalt Flows
08. Soft Sand
09. Square To Sphere
10. Metro Snake Whispers