SINK
Quiet Design
January 2008
CDR [edition 50]

Cyclic Defrost Magazine | www.cyclicdefrost.com

It begins with a flood of woolly electronics, a digitized bottom end bouncing around frenetically, accompanied by a shrill higher pitch, perhaps radio frequency. It doesn’t feel structured, the various frequencies coalescing into one body of sound like a huge piece of industrial machinery with a pulse. Josh Russell’s work is incredibly immerisve, his shimmering bottom end having a unique effect on the ears, a disorientating punch drunk feeling like you have been wrapped in cotton wool and spun around a few times. The sound is somehow familiar, yet not, perhaps it’s the timbre we recognise, the sounds that we normally block out that Russell has harnessed, and now has them behaving in different ways than we remember. Russell hits us with some noise, some staticy spluttery electrics that abruptly burst across the stereo image at quick yet intermittent intervals, later a micro drone, thin, pitched high, somehow soothing, gentle, evolving gradually, recalling bowed cymbals and religious ceremonies. This is Austin Texas based Russell’s fourth long player and not only are the various sounds incredibly articulated with a fine attention to detail, his transitions are nothing short of sublime. He is more than adept at developing a deep immersive sound world and subtly altering it over a period of time until you find yourself somewhere new entirely. This is the kind of electro acoustic sound art music you can lose yourself in. In fact I’d hesitate to think of another album of this ilk that utilises bottom end frequencies so well, yet with skips, hisses and feedback drones, Russell is always aware of the frequency spread, often using it as a tool to control dynamics. This is a fascinating accomplished work.

Bob Baker Fish

WHITE_LINE | whiteline1.wordpress.com [June 2008]

Breaking free from the current inertia of the microsound scene, Josh Russell has slowly been evolving and honing his sound and general approach, that for me, culminates in this energetic release on Quiet Design.

His recent "Music For Geiger Counters" on Koyuki Sound was a great entry point for anyone who hasn't heard of him, and this beautifully packaged full length release can only re affirm his status as one of a clutch of new practitioners of the ultra minimal, who are setting the bench mark very high indeed, in terms of composition and technical ability.

Sink is an exploratory dissection of the purely digital, homing in on micro-particulates, that once again draws upon the influence of people like Pita, and Kim Cascone to name but two, who were pushing the boundaries of digital experimentalism ten years ago. Russell doesn't necessarily offer any new solutions, but his concentration on pure sound show a rigour and determination not to take on any of the cliches perpetrated by the ever growing army of wannabe glitch artists.

Russell pares back his sounds, exposing them for all their beauty, and not confounding the listener with overblown layerings and treatments, but makes logical transitions through each segment of each piece, embracing several moods that encompass harsh and oblique processing that slide gracefully into billowing near-ambience. There are no harmonics on display here, and Russell makes great use of the tactile, visceral skree yielded by high quality digital output, each pop and crackle, clearly defined with rapier sharp precision. Sink, whilst not entirely unique, certainly hints at a promising future for both Russell, and Quiet Design, a symbiotic pairing that will no doubt offer us up more gems..Sink is one of them..go buy. BGN

Frans de Waard vitalweekly.net

Sometimes things are not what they seem to be. And sometimes they are. When I popped in this new release by Josh Russell, I thought we were dealing with the same person who presented microsound compilations on his own Bremstrahlung label but the sound coming out of my speakers weren't certainly microsounding at all. Loud, skipping, almost earthly sounds. Damaged speakers? Damaging speakers? Can't be the same, right? But yes, it's the same person. I checked the press message, and yes, it's him. He has a background in biochemistry and microscopy research, and 'Sink', while loud, may represent a bit of that background. It sounds like a chemistry lab, with obscure fluids being boiled, amplified and brought alive. Or looking through the looking glass and see lots of similar bacteria crawling about - it's them singing on this release. Russell puts on quite an amount of amplification to let you hear them. His loudest record to date, it says. Is he deliberately trying to break out of the microsound world? I hope so, since this sounds great. It has all the trade marks of microsound (minimal, glitch, plug ins, hey maybe even field recordings), but it's so much louder. In the dead end alley that microsound has become it's good to see someone trying to change things and Russell does a really fine job on 'Sink'. Excellently produced with a finer sense of detail in the entire sound range, moving about and varied. Rather one piece divided in ten steps than ten different pieces. The future of microsound has started.

le son du grisli

Adepte de musique concrète, le Texan Josh Russell interroge avec Sink la résistance d’objets sonores face au silence. Remaniés, les sons dressent pour toute réaction un rempart fait de craquements et de parasites, croient au salut de la progression d’un bourdon hésitant et déjà malingre, comptent sur l’effet dissuasif d’un râle inattendu. A force d’efforts, l’abstraction, peu à peu, s’évapore, pour laisser place à un chant de sirènes passées à l’ère du digital. N’engageant aucun frais, l’expérience est à conseiller davantage encore

chaindlk.com, Marc Urselli-Schaere

Austin-based Quiet Design delivered a brand new release in early 2008: the new album by lowercase sound pioneer (and fellow Austinite) Josh Russell (his fourth release to date). Russell's approach to sound mirrors his academic background in microscopy research. He zooms into the components, spirals down to the primary element-level substratus and turns the focus dial to reveal what goes unnoticed. Then he builds around that, making it the primary core of a new composition. In doing so he creates a broad universe of low pressure synthetic veils that hover and flutter over pulsating organic patterns in the same way that thick shades of oil colors would be layered over background textures on a Thomas Crown affair-like canvas, revealing new shapes underneath the ones you are currently paying attention to. It comes as no surprise to me that Russell is also a painter (which I found out from his website after I wrote this review). In a way, "Sink" is a very visual record, a very visionary record, a sonic translation of multi-pattern and multi-layer micro-cosmos of slowly modulating sines and throbbing bubbles of light. You might think of it as a dilated and liquified glitch electronica record in which the glitches have been replaced by stretched snapshots of the universe the glitch came from.