Shuttle358
Frame
12K
“If you put an empty frame against a blank wall, you suddenly notice the color, the patterns, the imperfections in the plaster. The frame draws attention to what is within it – it magnifies it, you focus on it, it begins to symbolize the whole wall.” – Dan Abrams.
Abrams is Shuttle358, a project that toys with auditory space, creating landscapes of sound with the barest of elements. A pop, a pad, a scritch, or a scratch; Abrams fills the room with soft drones, and microscopic clicks and pops. He’s one of the few trying to marry the burgeoning ranks of Mego- and Raster-spawned glitch to ambience and space music.
While many of the minimal techno crowd has a sense of the flow that is similar to Shuttle358’s, Abrams doesn’t use beats to convey movement. He uses looped sounds, modulating tones and sounds that grow and evolve as the tracks move on. “Frame” recalls the paintings of Piet Mondrian, with their sense of balance, proportion and simplicity of form.
The CD comes with a QuickTime video that is worth the price of admission. The video is a short meditation on distance, movement, and form. It consists mostly of footage taken by Abrams from the window trains in Los Angeles, and avoids the edit rush that plagues the visual accompaniments to abstract music. Highly recommended.
