Avant Music News

From WAYWARD MUSIC:

Seattle guitar maniac Bill Horist opens.

PHASE 3 is three smart men on computers and various other audio technology. I meet them in a cramped warehouse in Georgetown on a hot summer evening, we walk in parallel to traintracks and arrive past rows and rows of sturdy shelves and tons and tons of tech equipment. They are gentle and kind. finding me a clean cup of water. They settle into their nests in this jam-packed space, they can see each other and me. They place a set of headphones on me and either have their own draped around their neck or already in place around their ears. I’m not sure what to expect. Then suddenly and gradually I’m submerged in a new world. A modern, electronic sound that strangely intertwines with sounds of a kind of nostalgia, old mechanisms, manual typewriters, the voices of the moon-space program or some kind of manual…in moments the warehouse, the three men, and Georgetown are gone. Eerie quiet sounds repeating softly like a carpet of ants, a tiny bell rings or a gear turns in the far distance then emerges in a loud vibrant suddenness in the foreground only to get smashed and vanish into the sounds in the distance of an airport. I felt like I was both in a natural world and one that reflected on our own urban one. Insects and typewriters, loudspeakers, feedback and the sounds of dishes being washed mix and emerge, vanish and reappear. I felt bathed, intimately moved yet surrounded. After a couple hours they each gradually became silent and the warehouse and the three men all returned and I took off my headphones and I felt a bit stunned on my trip home in a van filled with more tech equipment and I fall into deep sleep with weird dreams.