For 21 years, Laura and Mark Cetilia have devoted their duo project to a rigorous excavation of all manner of striated artifacts. More than their instruments (usually cello and a flexible combination of electronics and synthesisers), Mem1 are recognisable by their tender attention towards what slips in and out. A standard track dilates around the uninvited objects asleep in electroacoustic phenomena. That their music is so often slow and quiet is a measure of their commitment to the fragile states of accidental feedback, distortion, acoustic imperfection and ambient interruption that emerge when instruments are subdued below a threshold. Mem1 are forever seeking the wispy crackles and soft air bubbles that lay trapped between tectonic drones, gently shifting focus away from the (minimal) material itself and towards hazy, less predictable peripheries. Theirs has always been a generous permission for such rich effusions, with the result consistently a notch above this century's deluge of stock electroacoustic drone music.
But Diapason – a 30-minute diptych, released this March on their in-house label Estuary in a handsome, limited-edition dyed vinyl – is their most burnished, patient and rewarding venture yet. The album is first a study of one room and its rare treasures. Abandoning their usual cello-plus arrangement, Diapason reconfigures around three time-bound instruments separated by two hundred years: a reconstruction of the seventeenth-century Charlottenburg Palace organ since lost to the ruins of war; a 1970 Minimoog Model D, preferred by Hancock and Sun Ra; and the ’80s pop goliath Roland Juno 60 analogue. All three live at Cornell University's Center for Historical Keyboards, and it is that campus's Anabel Taylor Chapel – a porous wooden chamber perched high on Ithaca's main hill – that provides the invisible third player on the record, an enveloping acoustic replete with trailing residues of its own. On both sides of the vinyl (labelled simply ‘Diapason I’ and ‘Diapason II’), L. Cetilia remains behind the Charlottenburg, while M. Cetilia alternates between synthesisers, differentiating the tracks by subtle degrees of light.
But the album is no mere zany instrumentarium, like a curio closet of forgotten sounds. The instruments in Diapason remain forever in service to an unfolding logic of the leak. While swell (as in its title) lends the album general material, it is the limitation of leakage – and the varying thresholds at which such leaks retain significance – that hem it in. Swell is only an impetus, a utility for testing limits: shifting spectra gradually reveal the precise threshold at which the hiss of air venting from an organ pipe can still be heard, the lowest valley at which haze of electronic interference can still be said to mingle with pitch before aerating it completely or the level of activity necessary to capture the birds chattering outside an open chapel window. This is what is meant by a logic of leaks: these many leaking objects – organs, synthesisers, buildings and recording equipment – teach, through patient attention to the varying acoustic returns of all manner of diapasons, where their intended result and fallible intrusion dehisce with highest drama.
It is a fool's errand to speak of drone music in the singular or momentary, and, indeed, what is most rewarding about Diapason is the epic scale on which one becomes aware of perceptional drift: knowledge of the many leaky punctures is accrued gradually, and no two listeners take note of the ulterior layer at quite the same time. But there are, however subtle, something like instants, nexuses in which the varying leaks pierce the fore, turning the soft bed of harmony into a kind of uneven topography of small ruptures and fissures. We might, for instance, attend to the rare moments when the organ enters without its dal niente swell, a hooty articulation that puffs a cushion of air into the otherwise seamless plane – or, elsewhere, when a crescendo crests its limit, petering off with an exhalation as if a pressure gauge had been tripped. There's the sound of wooden slats gently clattering as the organ, in silence, prepares for entry, evidence of an instrumental hapticity alongside pure tone. And then there is the ending, a dramatic evacuation of sound, a sudden shutting of louvres, a switch turned off that instantly reveals what has felt rather like loud room noise as having been a controllable phenomenon from the start, divulging at the last possible second yet another threshold of absence below what had previously been understood as the limit.
These moments are fleeting and easy to write off as mere ambient intrusions. But in the scope of Diapason as a whole, they are crucial knots that tether the soft blanket of sonic leakage into something like a layer of autonomous activity capable of being unconcealed as a formal priority. Leaks are fugitive phenomena, approachable only indirectly. But as the listener attunes to their intrusion, each subsequent striation recasts with greater force the more ‘musical’ material – pitch, chord, harmony, consistently gorgeous throughout – into a secondary role, present solely to discover and engage this hidden parameter of airy slippage and mechanistic encroachment. Harmony itself at last thins out, glassy and translucent, having revealed an even more vaporous and diaphanous substance slipping out and in beneath it.
