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Throughout his Serge Works (159:45) Ian Boddy emphasizes the "mental" in Experimental. With no intention of ever explaining itself, the music seems to emanate as a raw current given musical form. Fans of the Serge Modular Music System will find much to enjoy across the five realizations. Utilizing his Serge Modular Boddy endeavors to probe the sonic versatility for which this apparatus has become known. Such deliberate pacing may disclose these explorations as more a cold intellectual puzzle than some poetry deployed in sound. In the skillful coaxing of the Serge one could argue that the patch itself is the composition. Combining randomly self-generating modulation routings with the intention and invention of the artist Serge Works moves listeners into and out of a pentad of live performances of pure discovery. Wandering with perception and memory beneath a texture-driven, low cognitive load, the Ambient, late-night constructions of cerebral, cinematic elements support a presomnal storytelling. Deeper into this rational examination of variations in timbre over time, we sense the soul of the machine - under the care of a confirmed creator. Complex, organic and unpredictable Serge Works occupies space as an electrical formation of its own freestanding reality. A superb supplement to the approach heard earlier on After the Rain (2012), Modulations I-IV (2020-2025) and Tone Science (2016) this album confirms again that the most dramatic gestures still contain delicacy. Different and unknown, within Boddy's remarkable aural fabrications we experience light, as well as the darkness that allows for its existence.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 23 April 2026 |
