Pure | Noonbugs
Mego | CD
'Noonbugs', by the Austrian multimedia artist Pure, is a near 60 minute long cinematic experience in sound. Opening with insect-like sounds - that recur throughout and contribute to the overall feeling of the work - it is mainly a dark melancholic dirge with foreboding orchestral drones, sounds like water drips, and even a woman's chorus.
At its mid-point we have a reprieve from the heaviness with a bell-like sound - a state of suspension and limbo that leads to a rhythmic environment. More textures take over, another set of rhythms, ending with a texture very much like the one in the beginning.
'Noonbugs' is like a film without a story, parts of which can be listened to as background, but with other parts underlying an unseen drama. The fact that this work is so much like the score for a film makes 'Noonbugs' an exercise in visual imagination, and certainly a fitting soundtrack for the present state of things in the world... apocalyptic.
A sound and video artist, as well as a lecturer on object oriented computer language programming (Max/MSP/Jitter), Pure will be touring Scandinavia in early 2003.
[JH]
