AMN Reviews: Nate Scheible – Plume [Warm Winters Ltd. WW030]

In 2021, Washington, DC area sound artist Nate Scheible created a series of recordings as part of a Community Supported Art Initiative. On Plume Scheible, whose compositional work often consists of processing and manipulating recorded sounds in analogue formats, used those recordings as basic material for the album’s series of eight compact collages that differ in their details, but share a certain family resemblance: each piece is a kind of tapestry of sound consisting of atmospheric washes of portentous electronic chords and drones overlaid with randomly intervening or cyclically recurring events of a generally harsher profile. Over elongated, often minor-key tones Scheible has carefully placed bursts of percussion, rain-like pattering (or actual rain sounds—field recordings are one of the constituents Scheible used as grist for his sonic mill), manipulated recordings of voices speaking, explosions of static, and miscellaneous sounds from sources unknown. Scheible, a fine percussionist, gives his trap drumming a brief cameo appearance on Plume 7, while Don Godwin provides some piano for Plume 5.