AREAL, as a composition, is a work that focuses on surfaces, gestures, differences, and distances among material and its phenomenology. It focuses on activating and amplifying expressive sonic manifestations of electromagnetic waves utilizing radio technology. All sounds used to make this piece emerge from interacting with objects, exciters, and extended techniques to activate sounds within the perimeter of the working table space. The outcome emerges from physical modulations and from establishing relationships that simulate social and spatial interactivity in the form of conversation, where what is voiced out is the result of colliding effects that are vacuumed by electromagnetic receivers from within the atmosphere of the working area.

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From 23five: In working with sound, video, and installation, Richard Garet has made an artform of interference. In previous work, he's employed photosensors to control a particular audio signal through the erratic nature of a violently pulsing abstract film. He's flooded a performance space with fog to disperse multi-channel video work into an ephemeral yet sculptural mass, accompanied by an equally diffused sound design. And here on AreaI, Garet continues his ongoing research with electromagnetic disturbances through radio.

Garet treats the radio process of transmission and reception as a routing system for the audio signal, all the while deliberately agitating and distressing the nodes that direct the course of that signal. For example, an electrical motor might be situated near a radio's antenna disrupting its ability to properly receive a transmission that Garet is broadcasting from nearby. Through the controlled use of electro-acoustic techniques (some rough and volatile, some refined and delicate), he organizes the signal distortion, the crackling static, and the ever-present tendencies for feedback into swarms of chiming resonance, electrically sourced harmonics, tactile bricolage, and impressionist din. As much as Garet's process pushes the interaction of sound and electricity to the brink of self-immolation, Areal balances his crunched textures with extended passages of radiant blooms of blurry noise and drone, finding common ground between the glassine density from Rhys Chatham and the splintered excursions of Kevin Drumm.

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Reviews:

Dusted (April 2012): For a work that stretches out for over 50 minutes, Areal feels small. It's all about details, about micro-phenomena. Specifically, it's about the electromagentic fields that hover around Richard Garet's work table. Using a set-up of "objects, exciters and extended techniques," Garet activates and then captures various hidden sounds near his working space. What he reveals is lively and evolving: masses of greyed static, pinging harmonics, mechanical grinding, hollowed-out drones, slippery pulses and more. It's like scanning radio stations somewhere in the Great Plains and finding not dead air, but a whole world of broadcasts in an unknown language. Except the source of these broadcasts is not in some vast ether. They are intimate, and hidden right next to you. The description is oblique, because so is the process. Where Garet sources a particular sound and how each affects and relates to the other is difficult to discern. We can look at his set-up, but I'm not sure it makes us any the wiser about what we hear. The image is mundane and technical. The idea is evocative and abstract: Garet not as performer but as a medium channeling unseen and unheard forces. This not to say that Garet is "hands off" in this process. On the contrary, he is very much present, except his role is more as a mixer than composer. He fades elements in and out, overlays, and jump-cuts. But in no way does he attempt to impose a narrative or insert preludes, climaxes and resolution. It feels like a performance, captures a certain vital immediacy. Any more heavy-handed attempt to shoehorn all the stray, wild electromagnetic action into some kind of structure would surely have made the result ponderous. While Garet's methods resemble a sort of serious-minded nexus of sound art and sonic research, it's the response he provokes that is more vital. As the blocks of subliminal, grey-scale sound slide past, I was continually struck by how ominous and alien they are, and how they are made more menacing by existing so locally. They are, literally, all around us — a constant, haunting presence. It made me realize that while Garet does produce a certain intellectual and technical curiosity (a "how does he do that?") with his concepts, he also gets at a more intuitive response, one comprising some very basic, instinctual feelings: fear and its attendant excitement. What Garet conjures are ghosts, living entities that shadow everything we do. It's this gut-level reaction and how it bypasses the "how" and "what" of where it comes from that lets Areal be much more than its concept. -- Matthew Wuethrich

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Anti-Gravity Bunny (June 2012): Absolutely stunning drones on this one. Areal was originally an A/V installation (complete with fog machine), the audio portion of which has been transformed into this magnificent album length piece on 23five. Garet's work has been focused on electromagnetic fuckery, specifically with messing up radio signals, and this is a further exploration. It’s an exceptionally precise record with a hundred different sounds working through cycles of hissing & clicking. Hyper focus on the details is the only way to fully appreciate this when everything is as subtle and delicate as dust floating in a patch of sunlight. Areal‘s sounds are the breath of a sleeping city, a digital microcosm of hidden harmonies and static clatter, a barely visible vertical sheet of ice that’s slowly melting, simultaneously warmed & chilled, stretches of hushed minutiae, cut through with shrill tones and cracked wind. Not enough good things to say about this. And not surprised in the least, as both 23five and Richard Garet are always on top of the game.

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A Closer Listen (February 2012): Few artists ever attempt the single track, album length release, and fewer still manage to succeed. Richard Garet is the exception to the rule, as proven by last season's Decentering and this season's Areal. The key to Garet's success is sonic variety; this music unfolds chapter by chapter, instead of layer by layer. These particular noises came about as an experiment in transmission and reception. Component sections splay and arc: a speaker-to-speaker hiss, a static surge. Radio signals are muted, interrupted, blocked and thrown off course; distortions are flattened and teased. The result is sonic disruption, sanus interruptus. For those interested purely in sound and tone, Areal offers a buffet. Despite the distortion, the album retains a soothing characteristic. Hidden harmonies produce pieces that mimic chimes, organ and strings, even though these elements are absent. A particularly beautiful passage that begins in the thirteenth minute sounds like sleet falling on woodblocks, and is followed by the crackle of what could be hail or fire, but is simply a static witness dressed in downy tones. Bells are not bells, planes are not planes, and the whole subject of accurate listening rears its curious head. A few true sound sources do enter the mix, as Garet utilizes random objects as percussion and fires up an electrical motor; but for the most part, he serves as gatekeeper for the glut of sounds yearning to breathe free. A rusty wheel and passing shower in the 24th minute are the most obvious, but given the method of construction, even these are questionable. It's easier to marvel at the morass than it is to decipher the architecture, and it's nearly impossible to deconstruct what is already a deconstruction. On Areal, intrusion and interruption are no longer unpleasant terms, but a means to a more pleasing end. -- Richard Allen

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Just Outside (Februrary 2012): Another strong effort from Garet, part of a long string of same, departing a bit in structural terms from prior work in that the piece has a number of breaks and shifts, even as the substance of the music will be recognizable to listeners aware of his music. The tonal haze prevalent in Garet's sound is there, but drops out every so often, leaving the aurally delicious crackling and rustling that it had been enveloping before. When the tonality returns, it has shifted, acquired some darkness and edge, distant, metallic moans having become discernible. These welcome dissonances proliferate as the piece continues, the tonality escaping any cloying factor. It concludes in a wash of almost insectile sounds, bleak and cold--nice. -- Brian Olewnick

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Aquarius Records (February 2012): Oh, we love art made from glitches, errors, surface noise, smudges, corrosives, and just plain mistakes. Just look at how we've championed Caretaker, Phillip Jeck, William Basinksi, and Oval, and how many times we applaud something for sounding antiquated, garbbled, warbling, or just utterly fucked-up. Which brings us to New York based sound artist Richard Garet and his atypical electronic systems involving lo-tech circuits, radio transmitters, and dismembered speaker cones, we seem to have found yet another artist whose beautiful demolition deserves our attention.

Back in 2011, Garet presented an audio-visual live piece at SFMOMA, which involved a wildly stroboscopic, flickering projection that triggered jittery noises from his table top of toy walkie-talkies and bits of circuitry. With the potential for gnarled interference and ugly distortion that the cross-currents and bare wires might impart, Garet's performance was somehow instead jaw-droppingly elegant, drawing a taut line from minimalist drone & crackle through John Duncan's psychoacoustics and back to David Tudor's Rainforest excursions, but shifted just slightly towards a hauntological mesmerism with ghosts of melody seemingly buried within. Areal works in the same way as that piece; and dates back to a different installation Garet presented at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, where he flooded the space with fog and shot color-field projections into the space swirling together with the eeriely divine drones. The music on the disc in all likelihood is a distillation of the Issue Project Room extravaganza, heightening the drama and intensity of the sounds without having the benefit of a fog and light show. Garet cites radio as a source material for Areal, but damn if he doesn't get the device to sound like a Rhys Chatham guitar symphony, a field of chromatic density and shivering heaviness blossoming from supple tones and crunched noises. The album's lush atmospherics wax and wane with variable degrees of intensity, with ethereal drifts collapsing into scrabbled texture later to be engulfed in a harmonic cauldron of buzzing thrum. Garet reveals his hand at the end of the 50-minute composition with some unkempt radio interference that snaps to a sudden conclusion. You may hear bits of Tim Hecker and bits of Phill Niblock in Garet's work. Everything Garet has done up until this album has been very good; but with Areal, he's taken it to another level. Absolutely required dronemuzik listening! Jim Haynes

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Midheaven (February 2012): RICHARD GARET has employed photosensors to control a particular audio signal through the erratic nature of a violently pulsing abstract film; he has also flooded a performance space with fog to disperse multi-channel video work into an ephemeral yet sculptural mass, accompanied by an equally diffused sound design. His ongoing research in interference continues here with electromagnetic disturbances through radio: the process of transmission and reception is treated as a routing system for the audio signal, while the nodes that direct the course of that signal are deliberately agitated and distressed. For example, an electrical motor might be situated near a radio's antenna, disrupting its ability to properly receive a transmission. Through the controlled use of electro-acoustic techniques (some rough and volatile, some refined and delicate), he organizes the signal distortion, the crackling static, and the ever-present tendencies for feedback into swarms of chiming resonance, electrically sourced harmonics, tactile bricolage, and impressionist din.

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Scrapyard Forcast (March 2012): Floating not far from the decayed resonances of Jim Haynes and owing at least a slice of credit to John Duncan's Phantom Broadcast, is the new release by Richard Garet, entitled Areal. The album is a further exploration of Garet's practice with electromagnetic disturbances through radio, and is easily his most realized work in that realm. Through a musical process that is largely dictated by purposeful use of interference and distortion, Areal doesn't succumb to a murky free-for-all psychedelia, nor is it overly pedantic; and one should expect this from Garet, who sculpts his sound within a framework, while rarely truncating it.

Though not psychedelic in any conventional musical sense, Areal does at times share common qualities with the "mutant dronemuzik" psychedelia of one, Matt Shoemaker. The majority of the album is quite fluid, rarely breaking its form, save for a short section near the beginning that quickly introduces some sparkling high-end and then just as quickly moves on. While there's a sense of an undercurrent that is always pushing the piece forward in time, its the disruption in Garet's process that allows one to focus in on the work, adding a brightness, grit, and tactility, while also forming a nice counterpoint to the dark swell. Quite mesmerizing. Adrian Dziewanski