The music in question is constructed totally out of the sounds generated by a washing machine. The album runs across as a single, continuous thirty eight minute experience that starts with the grinding turn of the wash size selection wheel, and ends with the alert noise that signals that the wash is done.
Between these audio-verité book-ends, we experience an exploded view of the machine, hearing it in normal operation, but also as an object being rubbed and stroked and drummed upon and prodded and sampled and sequenced and processed by the duo.
Okay, it was all done with some occasional help from an ultra-local crew of guest stars (some of whom regularly do laundry with the „composers“). They all took part, either playing the machine like a drum, processing its audio, or sending MIDI data to the duo’s samplers.
The vocabulary of ths beloved washing machine, its rhythmic chugs, spin cycle drones, rinse cycle splashes, metallic clanks and electronic beeps are parsed into an eclectic syntax of diverse musical genres. The result is a suite of rhythmic, melodic and drone-based compositions that morph dramatically, but remain fanatically centered upon their single, original sound source.
The palette of genres in play reveals a hybrid musical DNA: Industrial music, vogue beats, gabber, dubber, Miami bass, free jazz, house, krautrock, drone, musique-concrete, ambient and new age music all churn up to the surface and are sucked back into the depths.
In this pattern of textures, the listener encounters elements that sound like horns, kick drums, xylophones, or sine waves, but in fact each component is meticulously crafted out of a manipulated sample of the machine.
In other hands, such relentless conceptual tightness would court claustrophobia. Happily, the willingness to transform audio and engage pop structure bypasses arid, arty thought exercises and produces instead unusual noises yielding weirdly listenable music.
In its starkest passage, we hear the rinse cycle of the machine run uninterruptedly for four minutes as a slow filter sweep combs across a kind of oceanic frequency range.
The result is a kind of “Environments” LP that never was: the Psychologically Ultimate Washing Machine. It’s a gesture that’s likely to infuriate some people and tantalize others.
Is this the conceptualist emperor’s new clothes, a wistful domestic reverie, a parody of recent moves in “object oriented” philosophy, a feminist point about alienated domestic labor, an elegy to a discontinued model that stands in for unsustainable and water-wasteful technologies generally, or simply an immersion in the beauty of the noises of everyday life?
Sucker-punching ambient pastoral, the album ends with a techno-industrial-booty bass workout that recapitulates motifs from across the entire composition before grinding to a halt, its task completed.
Funny and sad, bouncy and creepy, liquid and mechanical, this incredible music swirls with perverse paradox, but the agitation at its core offers vital evidence of faith in the musical potential of sound.
The artwork for the album is constructed entirely out of photographs of the machine in question shot in its natural habitat and then digitally manipulated. The washing machine was not available for comment. Apart from cd and vinyl, there will be a limited edition of singles only available for ancient jukeboxes. Perfect to play it just before or after Kate Bush’s „Mrs. Bartolozzi“, you probably know the song in praise of a washing machine.