Tomas Jirku - Immaterial
Pushing the edge of independent musical distribution are the sites featuring .mp3s. And not the ones that are pushing up the latest Maria Carey or Puff Daddy tracks tweaked and mashed so that you can hear that phat sound at your desk. No, the edge comes from those who are doing their own and distributing it electronically. The true .mp3 sites feature original music. No Type is full of ambient, break beat, fucked up beat, IDM that is simply free. And what's even better? A pittance saves you the trouble of burning an album's worth to CDR and nets you handmade packaging. And every dime you spend goes right to the guy who makes the site and the guy who make the music. That is truly demonstrating the power of your dollar. And where should you be spending your dollar this month? On Tomas Jirku's mesmerizing chill out album, Immaterial.
I recently discovered minimal techno. As always, I'm behind those true frontierspeople who have blazed a trail to find this music and, even as I arrive, the genres are already twisted and nearly untraceable in their cross-pollination. But there are a few who I've found worth focusing on: Thomas Brinkmann, Wolfgang Voight, and Tomas Jirku. Jirku's disc is an enveloping firmament of blissful tones; subtle beats which wash back and forth across you as distant chimes are stretched out across the horizon. Some of the tracks are named after sub-(sub)-atomic particles and feel like pulses gathered from high-powered microscopes as they observe the passage of these particles. The thump of the heavier ones, the mournful resonance of two mesons touching, the shpang of gluons ricocheting off one another, the creep of the pion, and the lament of the baryon. There's a whole world down here and Jirku has discovered it; he has tuned his ear so finely that he has heard the sound of these particles and has captured their movement on disc. Immaterial is minimalism (and I'm talking in simple electronically crafted music terms here) at its finest. It works softly, a subtle undercurrent to your normal environment; it works loudly, the bass rumbling and pulsating with its own heartbeat; and it works in the median range as well, a crafty dreamscape to lull your over-exerted mind. Immaterial is a sonic gem which constantly adapts itself to the environment, its facets never failing to amaze and captivate.
Tomas Jirku
notype.com [1999]
music
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