IGITUR CARBON COPIES  [ LP Hallow Ground ]

IGITUR CARBON COPIES is an album based on the unfinished gothic tale IGITUR, a collection of texts that eventually was abandoned by its author Stéphane Mallarmé in 1869. Connecting with Mallarmé's obsessions about chance and destiny, IGITUR CARBON COPIES is the fragmentation of all the roots that ran under its predecessor PATHS OF THE ERRANT GAZE and brings these to a provisional close: guided by David Tibet's voice reading the reworked text we descend through spheres of deserted anthems, disembodied voices, morse signals, crank calls, corroded tapes, radio statics, stones, while doing counting games. Here the acoustical spaces are manifold, blended or shifted in a heartbeat, where far and near, up and down are relative, where Riemann's god is pointless and angels are enjoying their space. Here perception is a vice that constantly hallucinates realities.

reviews                                

AURAL AGGRAVATION   november 2018

     

"..with Igitur Carbon Copies Reinier van Houdt presents a work of immense theoretical depth in an accessible form..a work about authorship, chance and destiny, temporality and the myriad contexts behind it..beneath its dark, rippling surface there's a lot going on..the eerie and the uncanny reverberate around every shadowy corner...it creeps around on the peripheries of the senses and pokes at the psyche almost subliminally.. One traverses this album in a state of somnambulance and bewilderment. But one definitely traverses it and its effects are definitive."

 

TONESHIFT  december 2018

   

"..  hides beneath its surface a nuanced exploration of compositional structure that, like many complex works, only reveals its true beauty with the application of patience and time... Reach past its inescapably spooky veneer, and you’re liable to discover a surprising ‘classical’ composition, with the composer voicing specific narrative devices via the building blocks of traditional gothic storytelling. Breathy whispers, sombre drones, distant bells and bleeps are also a means of investigating and unpicking the melodic and structural relationships of the work as a whole.. a wonderful narrative arc, and it is this – the consideration of the album as a whole..that elevates the work to such a high degree. What begins as a wealth of murky, harmonium-like drones, whispered voice, and distant sporadic percussion, soon broadens into a world of delicate synthesis.  It is intensely atmospheric, yet rendered with a certain economy – a strangely articulate soundscape arranged with understatement and precision. The gentle, unaffected production allows the recurring static, or the occasional tonal flurry, to stir the listener at each new burst, pulling them from an otherwise unbroken reverie.. "

 

NITESTYLEZ  december 2018

  

".. Employing the voice of David Tibet as a narrating layer reading fragments of the text atop an overall atmosphere of..brooding darkness, intense, partly electrifying drone, threatening noise outbursts, multi-layered, reprocessed Field Recordings, single note pianos..work best when listened to like a radio play / audio drama, in one session and with high levels of unperturbed concentration, allowing the sonic realm built around David Tibet's voice to create depictions of horror and suspense, a dark cosmos emerging from one's inner cinematic imagination, hypnotizing, spine-tingling and surely one that doesn't ever leave one alone throughout one's darkest dreams again. This is a movie without pictures, shot in grainy black-and-white and yet a well remarkable one for sure. Made for headphone consumption. Check." 

 

MUSICMAP   2018

  

"..the charm of unfinished works is that they don't exist. Their attraction is the absence, the hole and what is lacking: what could have been its ending? The unfinished work possesses un incontrollable urge to fill its emptiness. That's what we have to realize to understand this album by Reinier van Houdt..A nightmare that nevertheless you want to relive time and again, in a dreamstate with open eyes and listening ears."

 

BLACK MAGAZINE  december 2018

    

".. The soothing and analogue ambient atmosphere of the beginning only lasts less than a minute when a loud static blast introduces David Tibet's famous voice over a soft mysterious sound tapestry, talking about nightmarish experiences. But this is not a normal Radio Play: time and again the narrative interrupts itself or is interrupted by layers of soft or piercing sounds.., various field recordings, more static blasts, other voices or Reinier van Houdt's piano playing - an army of odd outside sounds that nevertheless seem to fit in an uncanny or worrying beauty.."