The eight unnamed pieces that comprise Yama Lamba A are generally undifferentiated: tiny envelopes of sounds, struck, plucked, layered and dense up and down the bandwidth shimmer, sustain and collapse against one another in a haze of specifics that yields up shifting glimpses of the briefest fragments of truncated silences: latticed gaps amid incessant thrumming. Like the works of Eloine and Shelf Life, Nagaoag generates an immersive field in sound and texture that seems to have descended into granular, component-level existence, unperturbed and happily post- everything. But unlike Eloine and Shelf Life, Nagaoag incorporates daubs of voice, transforming the pure abstractions of the multi-layered audio bath into something decidedly more literal. There's an odd tension to the way the slurring voice sits within the aural surround emanating from the highly specific clatter of the sources. Not a profound tension, more like the tension that results from being subjected to too many hours of the arbitrary. While no scream for meaning is needed, and the juxtaposition is clearly intentional, the problem is an indoctrinated response to mouth sounds that goes sort of like "voice = language = narrative". It's a disconcerting response (perhaps coming only) from this listener, but sadly unavoidable. And unlike the shrouded sources – all as teasing, unexpected and mysterious in their origin as those early works by Dome – the voice does not engage the listener in the same way. The vocal component poses no further issue of identity, and offers neither mystery or surprise – only more of a noise that is not noise.
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