Review: Ralf Wehowsky + Anla Courtis - Aseleuch Tendrradero

In the midst of Aseleuch Tendrradero I am reduced to the state of an infant, abandoning all thought to sound sources to merely marvel at sound as an alien and somewhat intimidating independent entity. My soundscape is strange and threatening, cartoonishly exaggerated and operating on a logic that I fail to understand – I hear the grey din of 20 tumble dryers rattling and whirring simultaneously, and a wombic mumble of a distant school playground, heard as a crest to a juddering loaf of low frequency blood circulation. Some moments of this release are terrifying: “Baj Lideste Ajtlergob” is a swift 38 seconds of lullabies crushed into broken car horns, all the more disturbing for the playful melodies that writhe and fit between the texture collisions, while “Xidnya Lomikti Lachasut” makes me feel as though I’m hallucinating a hurricane, and watching buildings bend like malleable rubber under the weight of a dense and quivering wind.

But it’s the movement of these sounds that really prises the comfort of inevitability away from me. Extremes in volume and panning are ungracefully explored; escalations and blackouts are sudden, and by about the halfway mark of Aseleuch Tendrradero, I learn to distrust any momentary deviation into plateau or gradual dynamic slopes. There are lengthy and uncomfortable voids of silence, which flick into action like a powercut – equally, there are explosions of static and terrifying sonic unknowns that leap out of the black, launch surprise attacks on my ears and sending my heart rate instantly into double time. No sooner have I started to untangle the mash of sound from the web of tape processing and FX – sensing glimmers of familiarity that allude to a material source – than they are swiped away and replaced by something just as bewildering, leaving me constantly scrabbling at an eerie, mutative indefinite.