(Neologist Productions) Aprotag’s self-titled release often wanders into what seems like fairly random soundscapes. But lying at the heart of these vast layers of manipulated drones is a sound palette five years in the making. Somewhere in the midst of the waves of noise and truncated rhythms is a memory and an undeniable sense of place. The sound of an ex-girlfriend’s dog barking, accidentally caught on tape in “Blue Silver Redo,” is shredded to its base components, reduced to where the details are gone. Only a blissful echo of reality remains intact.
This is Athens musician JJ Posway’s M.O., as he blends improvised and random field recordings with truncated compositions to form a mass of sound. There is no real narrative to follow. The album’s five numbers were recorded in three different houses around Athens. “Alec Lot I” and “II” evoke the spirit of a time and place, but without any details or frame of reference, happy accidents and abstractions open up for the listener to project and pull his or her own ecstatic experiences from the mire.
“October 11th, 1973,” resonates the loudest. The date in the title refers to the Pascagoula abduction, in which two Mississippi men on a fishing trip were purportedly taken by aliens. Here, the title takes shape as a commentary on the nature of memory versus reality. Events in the past didn’t always happen the way they are remembered; sometimes it’s better that way. Aprotag is an uplifting experience where chimerical impressions eclipse reality.
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