Review Summary: Sparse, sinister loops that seem to shift when they think you're not looking.
Biqui has, in all likelihood, been the introductory soundtrack to my oneiric episodes maybe 7 or 8 times in the past fortnight, since a recent change of schedule has meant I have to sleep a lot earlier than I am accustomed to lately. I'm not quite sure what it is about the album that keeps drawing me to it – since its release in March last year (2018 if you stumble across this at a later point) I've put this on while writing, making train journeys, idling away the duller work lunchtimes and, recently, as a sleeping agent. At its core, all
Biqui is are a collection of loops – sparse ones at that, at most comprising of a piano part, swells of cold, enveloping ambience, and maybe the odd bit of electroacoustic jiggery-pokery for colour. These loops aren't left to their own inevitable self-destruction as Basinski would have it, nor are they the vehicle for a dark, depressive narrative as explored by The Caretaker over the past 3 years or so. They just seem to... exist. Some of them, such as those heard on
Untitled tracks
4 and
6 are little more than ghostly pads; others are more tangible, but living in their own hazy murk like a memory one is desperately struggling to clarify.
I suppose, I wasn't sure what it was that kept drawing me to it until recently. But now, I think I'm starting to get it a little.
Biqui has become one of those little games that your mind plays when it's bored. Fractional dynamic shifts are the main driving agent of loops that are sometimes extended over eight-, approaching nine-minute time-frames. These movements aren't necessarily across entire phrases, but sometimes only on a note or two –
Untitled 2's piano loop ends on a note that will sometimes feel definite and final, and sometimes inexplicably soft. At least, that's the perception, but this leads to doubt – it makes no sense for the loop to do that, after all. Doubt is further seeded in other ways. For example, you'll be a few minutes into a loop that you've felt yourself get comfortable with, when you start wondering if those notes, already passed but kept momentarily alive by a withering delay, were even there previously –
Untitled 7's loop, offsetting each note's decay slightly, does this unsettlingly well.
Being entirely honest, I still don't know why I've opted for this one to go to sleep to. The low undercurrent of ambience swathing each loop - and for that matter the melodies of the loops themselves - are infinitely more sinister than what could be created with a more fully-fleshed sound. The possible presence of minute variations occupies that part of the brain that tells you to move a little bit faster when you're walking down a lit hallway and there's a dark room behind you with a half-open door. But it's these mutations – whether they even exist or not – that make me return to this again and again. The mystery of their existence enthrals me. I'm sure, with an afternoon spent cutting
Biqui up in Audacity I could determine for sure whether everything I think I'm hearing is actually going on, but I have absolutely no desire to. It'd be like conducting a full-scale, comprehensive study of Loch Ness to determine if there is something living in there – sure we could
know, but that
not knowing, in a world where less and less is unknown, is a beautiful thing.
