Byron Westbrook - A Landform Embodies A Mythical Creature Byron Westbrook
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Since his landmark 2015 album 'Precipice', Byron Westbrook has explored sound in broadly visual terms, using his subtle compositions to activate or address viewable phenomena or themes. Andrei Tarkovsky famously described his filmmaking process as "sculpting in time" and Westbrook takes a similarly philosophical approach to his detailed soundscapes, creating perceptible color, texture and physical space by carefully analyzing his various elements and their psychological effect on the listener, using techniques that are often only employed by film technicians. His last album, 2024's acclaimed 'Translucents', was an opportunity for Westbrook to directly address the concept of "audio afterimage", bending the history of electroacoustic music in on itself and dazzling the senses almost cinematically. And on its 2026 follow-up, 'A Landform Embodies A Mythical Creature', he continues the train of thought by making an even more concerted effort to harmonize with the language of visual art, working in parallel with acclaimed Los Angeles-based artist Brice Bischoff, whose enigmatic environmental photographs share much of the same creative DNA.
Westbrook first met Bischoff in 2013 and was immediately struck by their commonalities; not only did they share a fascination with duration and perception, but they both grew up in southern Louisiana, where the extreme humidity provokes a very tangible human response. Just as Westbrook explores space, texture and sonic color by working with long, detailed stretches of sound, Bischoff makes extended 15+ minute long exposures, interacting with the environment in front of his camera's open shutter to leave only phantom remnants behind. Both artists are concerned with the metaphysical, using their art to suggest a world beyond our own - operating on a different timescale or illuminated by different frequencies of light. The title of the album is taken from the text of Bischoff's book 'How Close' and its photographs, captured in a remote location that has often been used as the backdrop for science fiction films, directly inform Westbrook's approach to the sound.
Responding to 16 of the book's photographs, Westbrook created 16 discrete "audio scenes", using cassette recordings of his real-world interactions with resonant spaces, using various objects to create echoes and drones in canyons, caves and ravines. Back in the studio, he augmented the recordings with spatial effects more commonly used in film, fabricating artificial zones within his concrete environments. "For some time, I've been using sound to represent a sense of presence that can be visualized," he explains. "I've also been experimenting with the activation of environments as a way to illustrate space, so Bischoff's photographs - with their ghostly blurs of human intervention and sculptural objects - provided a unique prompt to explore that idea further." And that's expressed quickly as blustering winds metamorphose into seismic, rumbling drones on the album's opening side. Uncanny footsteps echo somewhere overhead before becoming rainfall and intricately tuned tones suggest the humming desert atmosphere.
Westbrook continues to work at his own pace, painting in subtle shades yet always recognizing the power of the edit. His scenes sometimes arrive with a force that's as powerful as the finale of "slow cinema" maestro Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 'Memoria', when an imagined object suddenly becomes real. Before the end of the first side, earthly sounds are augmented by chattering alien vocalizations and whirring mechanical whining that might suggest a vast extraterrestrial object looming in the mountains. On the flip meanwhile, Westbrook descends into eldritch territory, letting harsh weather uncover sounds that might have been buried for millennia. Often terrifyingly beautiful, it's sound that fluidly shifts between the physical world and a space that's much more intangible, suggesting history, myth and mystery with its levitational textures and colorful blurs. Like Bischoff's photographs, Westbrook's scenes consider the limitless possibility of the unseen: what might lurk in the parts of the spectrum we can't see, or hear?
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