The continual crossover between the wings of academically trained electronic experimentalism and what can generally still be called “indie music” – at least in the sense of independent labels, if not jangly whatsits troubling the charts – has long been in evidence with Kranky, thanks to performers like Tim Hecker and Gregg Kowalsky among many others.  Christopher Bissonnette’s third release for the label, Essays In Idleness, continues the association, with a series of pieces composed on a homemade analog synth. With Bissonnette having over a decade’s worth of formally recorded work in a variety of collaborative and solo contexts, Essays is also a chance to hear a performer not merely comfortable in an idiom but continuing to test it.

It does Bissonnette a disservice to call his work cerebral – here it’s as tactile, as he’s said himself, as one could want, audible in the way ‘A Deplorable Corrupt’ ebbs and flows with layered noise and serene keyboards interacting, a series of what almost sounds like dying amplifiers recording the sound of equally doomed machines. It’s somewhere between a ritual and a gallery showing, if not both. These themes of calmness and chaos as interaction drive much of the album, aiming to move beyond simple descriptions of sounding like a “drone” when there can be drones, of multiple sorts and strange kinds. Compared to where he was with his last, more spacious effort for KrankyIn Between Words – released seven years back – Bissonnette has embraced an angrier, much more unstable aesthetic.

Calling one track ‘Uniformity Os Undesirable’ both works as weirdly threatening command and as motto for the effort; though a mood is established throughout the album nothing quite resembles anything else. If new age is indeed back to some degree as functional description of a sound explored by many, this is a new and potentially dysfunctional machine age at heart, one where the clear feeling of feedback arcs as on ‘Delusions’ suggests the properties of Fennesz in one sense but are played with the kind of looming intensity that underscored original pioneers like Tangerine Dream and Popul Vuh on the other, a slow motion supernova.

‘Wasting A Little Time’ almost comes as a kind of concluding uplift to end the collection, tones bubbling like gongs floating in space, but Essays In Idleness is neither the product of someone resting on their laurels nor simply designed to offer an aural background for contemplation. You can if you want to let it, but it’s not an easy way to drift away.

Ned Raggett

http://thequietus.com/articles/15039-christopher-bissonnette-essays-in-idleness-review

Essays In Idleness is a translation of Tsurezuregusa, a collection of medieval Japanese essays, penned as streams of consciousness by the monk Yoshida Kenkō. Its casual, thematically miscellaneous nature is a hallmark of zuihitsu literature. In this form, all material is shaped by the author’s environment, be it the immediate, physical atmosphere or the space in which their thoughts are occupied. This is the approach that Christopher Bissonnette adopts for Essays In Idleness, contextually distancing himself from his reputation as a composer that places weight on the interconnectedness of the senses and the relationship between media forms. Bissonnette’s environment is an artificial one, creating with a premise of dissatisfaction towards current trends of gritty, feral and untempered analogue production. Essays In Idleness sees Bissonnette exclusively utilise a self-built analogue synthesiser, critically narrowing his own sound pallette with an all-in attempt to squeeze as much innovation as possible from himself and his tool. Essentially, it’s far from a risky gambit and is more akin to an experiment — or rather the results of Bissonnette’s tests in ambience.

As “Greenish in its Light” patiently opens the album with its slow waking, pensive probing of delicate textures, I’m preoccupied with the alarm bells ringing out in my head. I can’t fathom who the album is for, and why, and my search for existential justification, that our species craves so voraciously, remains unfruitful by the end of the record’s final waltz through harmonics, “Wasting a Little Time”. Bissonnette seems a deft enough manipulator of sound, though as accomplished his sonic craftsmanship appears to be, Essays In Idlenessleaves me none the wiser. The intended audience for experiments is traditionally other scientists or practitioners of the relevant field, and it seems to be a record both by Bissonnette and for Bissonnette — a test of his own ability as well as a gauntlet thrown in spite of producers less gifted in subtlety. The album propagates the esoteric bubble of the science lab, and I’m left peering through the glass at half-formed algebraic equations.

It’s the album’s intention to convey the worth of fully exploring and understanding the tools one possesses to create, as well as the seemingly forgotten art of mastering the instrument of choice. Bissonnette stretches and delves into intricacies organically, shirking the school of thought that keeps things constantly in flux in order to conjure an illusion of evolution. Occasionally, he strikes gold and really impresses, such as on “A Deplorable Corrupt”, an unwinding beacon that picks up a transitory melody as it veers off into the distance. Other times, the tracks can be as perishable as that chord progression, yet absent of its gleaming impressionability. Take “Missing Chapters”, which loses itself in introspection, or “Entanglements”, lingering in stasis — as pretty as they may be, they’re vacuous listens that don’t go anywhere, never mind take the listener along. They’re felt and held onto like a brief moment of gentle breeze amidst a blizzard, acknowledged rather than appreciated. Neither comforting nor healing, they simply exist, unmoving.

Whether Bissonnette’s experimentations are successful in light of his objectives remains unknown to all, save for Bissonnette himself; there’s no way for listeners to discern whether the shortfalls of Essays In Idleness are down to the constraints of the machine, or imperfect vision on the part of the one playing it. It’s a listen that glances more than touches, rarely engaging and largely passive, and as such, the potency of Bissonnette’s findings suffer. Ultimately, he stands apart from contemporaries but fails to stand out. One thing that certainly is clear is Bissonnette’s adeptness with composition and sound generation, discernable from the graceful consistency of the record, most rousing on the riffy soliloquy “Uniformity is Undesirable”. The seamless flow of the release stems from its shyness towards structure, a symptom of Bissonnette’s zuihitsu-like approach, allowing the peaks to occur as genuine surprises to the listener with no build-up of expectations. That said, streams of consciousness aren’t always particularly interesting to follow, with insights and delights few and far between. Essays In Idleness is a shimmering and glistening listen, though its beauty is fleeting and unenlightening. Rarely does the record provoke intuitive emotion or interest, and it’s time pleasantly spent rather than well-spent. Turns out it doesn’t pay all that much to invest so heavily in idleness.

by Tayyab Amin

http://www.by-volume.com/review/christopher-bissonnette-essays-idleness/