Bleep

This is less a straightforward album and more a complete conceptual reimagining of what a musical document can do. Conceived by artists Haroon Mirza and Jack Jelfs during their 2018 residency at CERN — the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, which also houses the Large Hadron Collider — The Wave Epoch is a striking work that interrogates our relationship to sound and solidity. The disc itself is a piece of playable artwork made from machine-made card and foil, inviting tactile action on behalf of the listener. Meanwhile, Mirza and Jelfs’ abstract polyphony of extra-dimensional tones, timbres and music-like matter are housed in the accompanying visual movie and audio files.

But through the wild flurry of activity, the musical shapes of The Wave Epoch are somewhat discernible. Like a vast work of contemporary avant-garde composition, shot through with the exploratory wonder of cut-and-paste techniques and sub-quantum kosmische, Mirza and Jelfs have helmed a project that is ruthlessly modern in its sheer comprehensiveness. Shades of UK grime burst out of the minimal wavelengths, bringing to mind the fused sophistry of techno and dub, as vocal snippets from grime abstractionist GAIKA and a host of other voices deliver meditations on the infinite and infinitesimal, weaving in and out of earshot like static between stations, or indeed, like intrusions from other dimensions.

The Wave Epoch is an auspicious multimedia work, packaged with a disc made from machined card and foil, a full visual movie and audio files.