Tony Buck - Unearth (2017) Hi-Res

Unearth is the first solo recording from Australian born, Berlin based composer and drummer Tony Buck in 15 years.

Many would recognise Buck from his work with the iconic Australia avant trio The Necks. His history as a player however reaches much further than this engagement. Over the past few decades, Tony has cultivated a language that escapes easy categorisation.

With Unearth he delivers his most accomplished solo composition. Built across several years, the record is the culmination of his approaches to percussive intensive, pulse and explorations in compositional density. The architecture of this work is framed unsurprisingly around a core of percussion but also draws heavily on Buck’s less known interests in guitar, synthesiser and field recordings. These elements coalesce, haunting one another in an evasive manner that is inexorable, creating a slow moving dialogue of extreme dynamic interchange.

Operating at a pace not dissimilar to what one might expect from a recording by The Necks, Unearth explores a gradual, swelling sound mass, teeming with details, cast across long dynamic arcs. Seeming to move at a pace simultaneously brisk and unhurried, the piece represents an exploration of and meditation on, the duality and paradox of time itself. Moments of fragile and infinitesimal sounds contrast with droning, dense layers; melodic and harmonic elements play out against backgrounds of texture and noise. The pieces elements operate together to render an impressionistic multiverse of worlds, unfolding and wrapping themselves around one another. The work exists as a hierarchical sound mass; a sedimentary layering of intensities , unearthed and unearthly.