Premiere: SR Hess + RM Zuydervelt – “Delusion”

Re:Collecting is an introverted album, a collaboration between Steven Hess (Locrian, Cleared, Pan•American, et al) and Rutger Zuydervelt (aka Machinefabriek) that steeps itself in memory, with Hess culling a selected audio-bank from his own tape archives and Zuydervelt processing what he’d turned up. Much of the starting audio is guitar and bass evidently, but ghosts of radio chatter and more textured noise is woven in throughout. “Delusion” is the album’s shortest and closing track, though it stands out for its appropriately split personality; an organ plays simply over a quietly seething battlefield of orienting noise, radio chatter and airy ephemera, with roving cones of looped drumming or strings. The track is dominated by that duality, with the organ tones creating a detached melancholia and the rising bursts of miscellaneous background noises adding an odd sense of contained melodrama. Not to muddle things too much with seasonal picturesques, but the palette and structure here puts me in mind of a snow-globe… in the movies when a camera sweeps in for some animated intro shot, and you slowly perceive miniatures in action, little gestures and movements taking place, before zooming up a reindeer’s nose, what-have-you. In that scenario “Delusion” is stationary, has only an incidental seasonal agenda, and gives you plenty of time to look.

Order a copy of Re:Collecting from Umor Rex.