Timothy Fairless – Keep Talking to Me (2025; Dragon’s Eye Recordings) – Avant Music News

Australia’s Timothy Fairless uses a generative sound installation to create what is heard on Keep Talking to Me. This makes the album interesting in both a procedural and a substantive manner.

Given noises, the installation repeats them back in a different fashion – echoes of the original snippets. With voices, this results in not only sonic but also semantic changes – a call and response through a lens that distorts both audio and morphology. But Fairless submits field recordings as well, extending the installation’s’ reflectiveness beyond just language.

As for the listening experience, the five mid-length tracks present rough-hewn constructs that crackle, loop, resonate, and fade. Falling motifs permeate what otherwise resembles a take on mechanical decay – perhaps an analogy to devolution of discourse or thought. Background drones surface now and again to add a haunting atmosphere.

But Keep Talking to Me is not overtly dark. Instead, it is an investigation of transformation. It illustrates how meaning changes through mediums of communication to take on interpretations that were likely unintended by the creator.

The unsourced sound of acousmatic music is an especially fertile ground for these notions. Without presupposed narratives based on lyrics or instrumentation, every one of Fairless’s sonic events – whether from field recordings, processed voices, or electronic tones – become a signifier that is jointly constructed by the listener’s imagination.

Needless to say, Keep Talking to Me is very well done and sets a high-water mark in experimental abstraction. Highly recommended. The album will be released June 20, 2025 by Dragon’s Eye Recordings.