Tomas Jirku – Touching The Sublime

Considering it sounds like someone forgot to turn up the treble on a mixing desk from -12dB, the crackles and pops are heard too well. Both gatefold edges were cut through due to vinyl sleeves pointing up. Weird experience.

What is interesting with a label like Silent Season is that their releases are more and more unexpected. This is not always the same repeated sound from album to album. There is a real aesthetic approach and this latest release confirms this. There is always this typically captivating sound that the label offers us since these beginnings but here, the album is perhaps a little more dissonant and even challenging but we are rewarded by an unsuspected and unexpected beauty through this abstract fog. Production is extremely subtle and rich, pressing makes full justice to the work of a goldsmith.

Another fine release from the Silent Season headquarters. Deep, abstract electronics from producer Thomas Jirku. Not the usual sounds from the label but still a totally engrossing listen. My favourite track is Tectonic Monument..wonderful stuff! Go get this.

From SS.
omas Jirku began his career in the golden era of minimal and glitch techno, helping to define the genres through releases on Alien8, Force Inc., Klang Elektronik, and Traum. Over the past two decades, Jirku has built a strong repertoire with his exploratory approach to music, experimenting across genres to develop a sound he can call his own.

“Touching the Sublime” is the culmination of this work, with material transformed through performance, experience and introspection. Inspired by his explorations of the remote wilderness that surrounds his home in Vancouver, Canada, Jirku evokes the philosophical concept of the sublime, where an overwhelming experience of awe confronts us with the limits of our rational minds.

The album is a synesthetic auditory expression of Romantic era prose and stories of early alpinism. Bringing epic orchestral compositions and intimate guitar passages together with Jirku’s unique sense of space and texture, “Touching the Sublime” draws from his most important collaborators and influences to create a uniquely personal result.

The album is accompanied by a limited edition photo book, where, as an accomplished photographer, Jirku has captured the landscapes and vistas that have been his inspiration.

RA:

Canadian minimal veteran Tomas Jirku has been a little quiet of late, but now he makes a welcome and unexpected return with something quite different for Silent Season. You can hear echoes of his earlier work in the soundscapes he's sculpted across Touching The Sublime, as high-definition sonic manipulation draws on his experience and eye for detail in wielding music technology, but rather than creating pointillist rhythmic structures, he's more concerned with billowing clouds of ambience. It's easy to draw parallels with the likes of Tim Hecker, but there's space for more techno-oriented productions in the midst of the maelstrom. Epic in scope and powerfully rendered, this is an album that will feed your head for a long time to come.