3/4HadBeenEliminated - "Shifting Position" (A Year Of The Aural Gauge Operation)
A Year of the Aural Gauge Operation is the second album by Italian quartet 3/4HadBeenEliminated. Like recent music from their peers Renato Rinaldi and Giuseppe Ielasi, 3/4HadBeenEliminated transpose buzzing pools of insect chatter with rich, swelling drones and movements that gesture toward song. It’s another kind of ‘post rock’ that’s far removed from the genre’s typical signification. Where previously the term may have evoked slack-wristed, head-nodding fusions of jazz, electronics and rock, groups like 3/4HadBeenEliminated engage in nothing less than the molecularization of rock music, reducing it to a dense, evocative slurry of phantom tones and fleeting, melancholy phrases guaranteed to induce déjà vu.
The quartet often disrupts their own compositions, with several pieces dipping abruptly into silence only to gradually recharge on a different plane. The most engaging moments on the album occur when Claudio Rocchetti’s turntables and electronics inject ghostly voices, gritty noise and other incidentals into slowly developing themes. Building edifices of sound that threaten to topple even as they reach a graceful peak, 3/4HadBeenEliminated remind me of This Heat in their concrete approach to rock and improvisation, as they repeatedly let frayed ends disturb the pieces collected on this quietly stunning disc.
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