Montreal-based sound artist and musician Also Steve Bates seems to thrive on setting himself challenges. For his 2022 debut for Constellation, ‘All The Things That Happen’ he focused on the sonic potential of his Casio SK-1 to shape an album which raged noisily and crackled with tension. This was ambient music which seized attention. Now comes his follow up for the label, ‘An Infinite Antenna’ and Bates has once again shifted the parameters.
Firstly he’s freed himself from the focus on a single instrumentation, adding a hoard of synths, beat machines, distorted drums and dashes of guitar to his sound palette. However such expansion still comes with self-imposed constraints. For ‘An Infinite Antenna’ Bates set out to avoid the long form convention of immersive music and keep the pieces sharp and to the point. He admits maybe he didn’t “quite pare it down to Minutemen durations”, with a few tunes piercing the two-minute barrier, but throughout the album he kept that ‘short and sweet’ mantra close to heart “as a sort of whisper over my shoulder.”
It’s that economy and focus, coupled with his broadening soundscape which gives ‘An Infinite Antenna’ its punch and clarity. On Green as a ghost the eerie noise of sonar, static and switches soon crumbles into Basinski-esque organ swirls. After condensing to a tidal drone these loops suddenly open out onto a white-noise vista, coloured by a Frahm-like piano and dramatic drum thunder. In four minutes listening you have travelled some distance. Easier said than done also unravels speedily from booming guitar distortion to new age warmth and back and again while Lettre d’amour à Fly Pan Am briskly references fellow Constellation experimentalists with motoric beats, oscillating organ and fidgety synth scribbles.
Bates has also said that another inspiration for the album was imagining “a slowly scanning a radio dial”. ‘An Infinite Antenna’ certainly tunes into different spaces as it unwinds and uses source recordings he made during his recent itinerant life as an artist working in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Austria, Greece, and Saskatchewan. It’s his ability to bring a sense of place to each track which personalises his work here. The atmospheric flow of the rippling Decades of River Widths and the graphic audio journey of Mountain Scene bristle with scenic detail. On Swiss Apartment Layouts Bates manages to paint a sound picture which projects majestic scale and ominous emptiness.
Zoning in on such contrasts underpins many of the pieces on ‘An Infinite Antenna’, bringing an unpredictability and realism to his sonic observations. The surging rumble of distorted low-tones gives way to haunted melodic ripples on Corporate activity, ancient shipwrecks; Battles and sieges and street trees diverts from pattering guitars and bass throb to a far-off chapel organ within whispering rustle; and Waste, songs of the world arcs from post punk heft to restless piano jazz, through to an echoey hymnal wonder-cave. Nothing is as it seems in Steve Bates’s music.
Tellingly ‘An Infinite Antenna’ is beautifully anchored between the calming warm, synthy hum of Pink pink pink pink …pink pink as an opening track and the resolving monotone layers of Swamps and Factories for a coda. It’s as if Bates has to tune into these echoes of Yoshimura, Eno,Ciani and Sakamoto to gather himself before he let’s go of the familiar and finds his own way. He always takes up his challenges though and offers them up for us to share. This makes tuning into his journey on ‘An Infinite Antenna’ such a revealing experience which gets you listening and looking inside and out.
Get your copy of ‘An Infinite Antenna‘ by Also Steve Bates from your local record store or direct from Constellation Records HERE
