3.18.19 by Tony Lien

According to the Reserve Matinee (a Chicago label established in 2018 that boasts a shockingly wide variety of releases to date), the man behind Temporal Movement (David Wesley Sutton) has been releasing experimental noise music since 2004.

It pains me to think of the absolute shit I was listening to back then during my freshman year of high school. But don’t worry — we’re not going to pry open that barrel of partially decayed noxious waste right now. Instead, we’re going to discuss Sutton’s brief yet engaging album “118”.

The entirety of the tape contains a Steve Reich sort of devotion to ever-evolving minimalist repetition. In this, the tracks are almost automotive in the way they are pushed forward through auditory space. In the opening title track, major stabs (which I perceive to be effected field recordings) soaked in reverb drive the ten minute composition through a misty haze of oscillating ambience to an eerie, jumbled crescendo — the journey taken as a whole reminding me of a car ride that starts in the middle of nowhere and ends up in the heart of an unfamiliar city. The final track “Mound” contains a similar notion of movement, but is augmented by bouncy violin passages that harken back to some of Moondog’s more contemplative compositions.

That being said, there’s a modern-classical element to Sutton’s noise — which is not something you hear on a regular basis. This is not so much due to instrumentation or the overall sound of the album, but rather by the apparent underlying mastery of arrangement techniques employed by Sutton throughout the tape’s duration.

As of writing this, there are 4 copies of “Temporal Movement” remaining on Reserve Matinee‘s Bandcamp. I’d pick one up while you can. This is one of those albums where, like a good Charlie Kaufman movie, you will notice something new hidden in its layers every time you sit down to experience it.