Neuro… No Neuro - MemLoss (Audiobulb) [Ambient]
- The Slow Music Movement
- 5 hours ago
- 2 min read
*** This blog post first appeared in TSMM's July 26th Newsletter, where you can get all the tips (and more) first ***
After the Romeo Poirier release a while back, I didn’t think albums could get much more poignant, but this one from long-time TSMM fave, Arizona resident, animal technician, abstract electronic aficionado, painter and graphic designer Kirk Markarian aka Neuro… No Neuro is something else.
It certainly seems to have been a year for musical accounts of artists’ struggles with serious health issues; see also the Autorhythm album which takes its inspiration from the artist’s seemingly successful battle with Parkinson’s Disease and Piksel’s neoclassical music inspired by her cancer treatment, both of which I’ve just lifted from the website and added to the end of the newsletter for the curious (and TSMM blog-deprived).
Although the issue is not named, in Markarian’s words “MemLoss is about my speech and memory becoming noticeably inconsistent. Day-to-day, I am forgetting words when I speak (not when I write), as well as forgetting various steps in whatever task I’m supposed to be doing. Because of this, I’ve begun using my music, animation, artwork, etc., as a method of documentation. Not so much documentation of speech and memory loss, but of the confusion it leaves behind.The most interesting part of this issue, to me, is the amount of proof it takes to get those around me to actually understand what is going on. From having to use descriptors instead of the actual words I need, to inadvertently missing parts of the processes I perform every day. While it is audibly and visibly apparent; rather than trying to understand, it’s discounted. Most frustrating is the decline. Of course this is glossed over, because it’s like watching an hourglass - change is happening slowly - faster now than before, but still glacial to the outside observer.MemLoss will be my opening statement on what is happening. Going forward my style will both be pulling from the past and becoming more and more like what is happening to my mind. Fragmenting and reiterating.”
But this is no pity review. The music is great. MemLoss continues Markarian’s well-honed line in post-glitch ambient minimalism. His music is unrepentantly electronic, and somewhat refreshingly, I believe, no birds have ever been recorded for his creations. Oddly though, there is a somewhat bucolic air to his ambient works, but more in a violence-free platform video game through lush alien flora soundtrack sort of way.
Markarian hones in on machine-generated tones, oscillations, echoes and pads; isolating fragments, enlarging then sculpting them, before shrinking and rearranging the newly shaped pieces into traditional arrangement eschewing soundscapes, that despite the lack of obvious refrains and the plethora of irregular pulses, bleeps, clicks, pops and whirs, have a chaotic yet cohesive flow, cosmically attuned nature and rather blissful audio texture, that will please both those requiring an otherworldly backdrop for life stuff, and the headphone-clad sonic explorers looking for a deep dive into painstakingly crafted ambient soundscapes.
I’m curious, although I’d like to think not in an accident rubber necking kind of way, to see how the series develops, and can only wish him well.
