Bleep

Since releasing Therapy With Colour in 2020, Montreal-based producer and sound artist T. Gowdy has embarked on a number of audiovisual ventures. Unrestrained by lockdown, he thrived in virtual spaces, deploying kaleidoscopic glitching visuals for screens worldwide. Two years later, he returns to Constellation with Miracles, his second album for the label which regurgitates his past performance material into a labyrinthine work that looks to the future.

Based on an unreleased audiovisual performance from 2018 that focussed on surveillance footage, Miracles explores themes of memory and transformation of raw material with a vast, honeycomb-like structure. The tracks play out less like a linear musical narrative and more like moments trapped in time, skipping tapes and looping security recordings captured by a haywire CCTV system, creating musical feedback in the control room. This manifests not only in the tense subterranean rumbling and harsh, sandpaper-textured noise of the opening ‘350J’, but also in the constant chimeral shifting of subtle ambient explorations found throughout the album.

On lead single ‘Déneigeuse’, overblown kicks cut right through the mix, rendering diffused hand drums into apparitions, meanwhile filtered synths frantically try to shovel a snow bed of white noise off the road. ‘U4A’ stutters like the vocal exercise of a robot recalibrating itself, making its underlying functions known through randomised, pixelated melodies. Wire fence strums and glass taps vacillate with uncertainty, coming together on ‘Transcend II’, where synths interact, scatter, and cut each other off in the shimmering soundscape.

Rather than burst into a dancefloor whirlwind or electronic symphony, Miracles evokes its emotions through slowburn repetition, dodging expectations and emphasising its conceptual charm.