Degraded Certainties

Degraded Certainties is Leimer's first exercise in generative music. Assembled from an inter-related library of instrumental and field sources the CD explores not only the juxtaposition of different sources, but the way way in which the pace, density and pitch of music affects perceived time. While all the tracks are of identical duration, listeners tend to experience the individual pieces as having much different run times. Gregory Taylor contributed some severe EQ and the final form of the pieces was accomplished by Taylor Deupree during an extended period of editing, remixing and mastering. The quality of the recording and the sense of space are quite remarkable. Crackling sounds, dripping noises, seem to emanate from all around. Degraded Certainties is music to immerse and lose oneself in, to fully revel in the letting go. – Electroambient Space Long-time Palace of Lights contributor Kerry Leimer follows his The Useless Lesson (2007) and Lesser Epitomes (2008) with another superb chapter, Degraded Certainties, whose six settings are all, curiously, twelve minutes in length. Leimer is credited with digital synthesis and signal processing, and Gregory Taylor and Taylor Deupree also contribute treatments, processing, voices, and post-production to the recording. Apparently the tracks' material was generated via the layering of arbitrarily ordered tone clusters and by using signal reprocessing as the principal method by which to determine the music's timbre and form. Such production details are interesting but convey little, however, of how beautiful the six soundscapes are that Leimer and company have created. In the opening “Angoisse,” an occasional harp pluck appears amidst enveloping swathes of digital sound, while vaporous shimmer and hazy synth tones (“Homage”) and phased slivers and lilting string plucks (“French Opera”) dominate elsewhere. A connection to classical minimalism emerges during “Common Nocturne” when sparse droplets of acoustic piano playing appear alongside gentle synthetic swells. Strings and electronics swim leisurely in deep electro-acoustic seas, and ethereal, elegiac, tranquil, peaceful, and placid are just some of the words that might spring to mind as you listen to the recording's time-suspending settings. – Textura