TP005 Thomas Peter - Circular

Solo improvisation, recorded in an open/closed space.

Thomas Peter - Feedback system, drums & objects, recorded in Zurich Feb 2010.

Edition of 50,
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Review(s):
The Watchful Ear
So my thoroughly productive day was soundtracked by all kinds of music, but this evening i have been playing a CD by a musician named Thomas Peter, a release on the Theme Park label named Circular. I knew nothing about Peter before this release, and having listened to it, and done some googling I remain thoroughly ignorant about his activities. He is credited here as playing “feedback system, drums and objects” but what isn’t entirely clear to me is what the feedback system consists of, or at least through what mechanisms it is channeled so as to make the music contained here on the CD.

Circular is a simple, delicate release that mostly consists of thin, wavering slithers of feedback that sound very much like the saxophone feedback output of Graham Halliwell or John Butcher. These lines of sound slip and slide over each other to create a soft, amorphous music not all that dissimilar to the more ambient tracks on Toshi Nakamura’s recent Egrets solo album. The feedback is joined here and there throughout the ten tracks on the disc by other sounds, rubbed drum heads, small knocks and rattles etc, but these are kept to a minimum, so increasing their impact alongside the feedback loops when they appear.

Circular is a little frustrating as there is a lot here that suggests a really strong album could have been made, and in places the disc really shines, but a tendency to allow things to slip into a slightly too easy ambience drags it down here and there for me. The feedback clouds float in and out of view regularly, so any form of continuous drone is avoided. Sometimes the streams of tone just wobble about in a relatively ’safe’ area, but on occasion they spill over into more fierce screeches, or combine with the minimal other sounds to break up the prettiness, and to be fair this happens often and to great effect, but on a few occasions things are left to congeal a little.

The best track here by some way is also the last and longest. Track 10 clocks in at a fraction over ten minutes, and while it contains the same drifting cumulus of billowing feedback there is also a continuous grey background to the track. I think maybe a window had been left open as the piece was recorded, so a featureless, low key murmur can be heard throughout, accompanied occasionally by small percussive sounds and almost clockwork-like scrapes and rubbing, all very muted and hidden under the cloak of the foreground feedback twines. A thoroughly charming track, this last piece points towards the strengths of this album- a sense of subtle understatement wrapped up in the thin blankets of sound thrown over it all. If this last track works well because of its delicacy, elsewhere I might have preferred a little more grit thrown into proceedings, a few extra barbs added here and there to keep the music away from candy-floss territory. As it is, there is a lot of promise in this album, a decent display of skill and control of what is a difficult and unpredictable area of music-making. I just think I’d have preferred a little more edge to the music and/or some more variety in the approach. Still, Thomas Peter is a name I didn’t know before but will now keep an ear open for. I’d be very interested to hear him play in a collaborative setting as well as I suspect his sound would be the perfect foil for a good number of other instrumentation.
- Richard Pinnell -