Jano Doe - Duranzie (2018)

"The sounds emanating from her blend of custom-built modules and vintage synths challenge the perceptions of the human ear, simultaneously bobbing along and screeching triumphantly."
(Tristan Bath / Spool's Out)

JANO DOE uses homebuilt electronics to create sounds exploring limits of our auditory perception, incorporating extreme frequencies, volumes and sound event timescales, frequently crossing the barrier to physical sound perception. This sound is defined by inversions, creating the notion that the instrument is controlling the instrumentalist and where the formally sonorous becomes a representation of electrical, physical phenomena even before it is sound. Using intuitively conceived module arrangements, chaotic systems with fragile equilibria occur, always sweeping closer to the catastrophe point.

On DURANZIE, we are confronted with a heterogeneous handful of sound fantasms. More like trajectories around some attractor than anything like arranged concrete events, this sound maps out its own constraints, like a cartographer of its own circuitry. These are autonomous pieces which purely refer to their own conditions of existence. On the first half of the album, these self-contained pieces are presented in sequence - each piece navigating some kind of local extremum, a little island of stability in some kind of terrible storm. Sometimes this results in bubbling, elementary waves, other times the result is like scanning through a minefield of interference, immersed in a cold hiss or ripped open by mechanical chirping. On the second half of the album, the converse approach results in a lone colossus patiently thawing, a pure tone crystal slowly breaking apart, forming tiny capillaries, trapped tensions finally circulating and slowly transforming itself into a whole different state.