Photo FANA FENG
Remember when Magic Eye paintings were a thing? Or at the very least—we’re looking at you, millennials—that one Animal Collective album with the no-LSD-necessary record sleeve? Body Consonance is a bit like that, turning the ambient wallpaper of Byron Westbrook into a dimension-hopping time portal.
Or as his new label Hands in the Dark puts it, “Body Consonance is a meditation on physicality, a virtuosic choreography of sonic textures, colors and shapes woven together; Bodies in motion, conversing, orbiting, colliding.”
We can dig it. Here’s the record’s brain-tingling opener, along with some commentary, album details, and a dive into Westbrook’s deeply immersive discography….
“Dance in Free Fall” is built from an improvisation where I was focusing heavily on using relationships between sounds delayed slightly between two speakers to create a changing sense of dimension and perspective. To me, the results are sounds that emerge into the listening space as opposed to offering a window to view another space. I like the thought of it functioning more along the lines of a 3-D hologram than a stereoscopic photo, but maybe it sits somewhere between those two things.
Body Consonance
(Hands in the Dark, October 13th)
1. Dance in Free Fall
2. What We Mean When We Say Body Language
3. Levitation Game
4. Ritual Geometry / Sympathetic Bodies
5. Fireworks Choregraphy
