Album Notes

"Immersion: Water Works" is the full-length CD debut from Archive, sound artist Mike Hallenbeck's "musique plastique" project. The music explores minutiae, margins, and slow changes over time, imagining new sonic spaces for the listener to inhabit.

Experimental label Insides Music proposed the release of an Archive disc, and Hallenbeck chose water as a subject. Given its array of manifestations, water provided a wide spectrum of sound and musicality to investigate.

Hidden harmonies and rhythms emerge in "Timeshare" as gurgling lake water under a dock unravels at various speeds and tumbles through digital scrambling. "Some Other Day" evolves from lush rainfall into a chorus of overtones and turntablism derived from individual raindrops. "Hear No Shovel" plunges the scrape of shovelling snow into a chasm of booms and crunches as audio dissolves at a fraction of its original playback rate.

These long-form abstractions are bridged by brief untreated field recordings: dogs splash around on the banks of the Mississippi River, rain splats on a metal roof, snow crunches underfoot on a still night. Imagining music-making as a dialogue with one's environment, "Immersion: Water Works" offers an opportunity to experience an unknown world concealed within the everyday.