Four Malleable is comprised of what are among Richard's best compositions from four different years: Imaginative Elements (2004), From Modified Tapes (2005), Sceneries (2006), and Nocturne (2009). Four previously unreleased works that place the mind's eye inside malleable forms and blurred locations.

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Tokafi (March 2010): With "Four Malleable", the double CD released by and/OAR in late 2009, Richard Garet offers us, if not a definitive statement of his work, at least a focused itinerary through his sound production over the last six years. Garet is a visual artist as well as a sound composer, working with video and photography in addition to the sound- and image-process installations and performances for which he increasingly is becoming known. The process of working a given material for its internally-defined qualities, without regard to associational or representational meanings, is a major focus of Garet’s work, whether he is working with projected light, digital sound, printer ink, or acrylic on canvas. With “Four Malleable” we get to see that process at work in a number of ways, and this release gives us the perfect vantage from which to appreciate the strengths of this approach, as well as to view some of its contradictions.

“Nocturne” is the first and most recent of the CD’s compositions, and the release’s strongest work. Tonal arrangements hover without resolving into actual harmony with an undercurrent of digital grit running throughout. This gives way to a hazy squall of white noise midway through the piece, then to a kind of feedback tone which in turn evolves slowly into an ultra-high frequency buzz and hiss, and a return to static, arriving at an abrupt full stop. The open question in any of Garet’s sound works seems to be, “how does a material in the process of becoming, be it through a “natural” unguided process or through a “compositional” process, come to find its form? And how does one recognize this form as appropriate, or even necessary, to the material?” “Nocturne” takes up this issue and brings it to a tight and logical extension, giving us 30 minutes of what feels like an effortless, casual unfolding that on closer inspection becomes a marker of the work’s formal rigor. Garet puts many things in play in his complex works, often placing contradictory impulses and ideas in dynamic tension. When this balance is struck, as in “Nocturne”, the result is quite powerful.

One immediately apparent touchstone for “Nocturne”, and to a lesser extent for all the pieces on “Four Malleable”, is Illusion of Safety’s late 1990’s work, especially their own double CD “Of and The”. This process of balancing impulses is a driver in both epic-length works: balancing noise and repose, natural and post-processed sound, meditative and sinisterly imposing gestures. Garet takes IOS’s instincts to transformation to another level of abstraction, rarely touching down on recognizable field recordings on the one hand or on traditional musical scale on the other. This parallel with Garet’s work extends to an extent to other artists in Illusion of Safety’s orbit, including Kevin Drumm and Jim O’Rourke, who share an interest in working with the heft and menace of noise in a refined manner.

As suggested by the title, both J.M.W Turner and Claude Debussy also surface as resonant touchstones for “Nocturne”. Both provide telling cues to Garet’s use of abstraction, and the processing of recordings into passages of organized sound. Despite Garet’s stated interest in sound’s purely inherent qualities, the work seems to strive for a kind of imagistic perspective as much as for a pure abstract plane of affect. “Nocturne” is so effective partly because its abstraction does not arrive pure, but rather “infected” by a strong visual sense. But a visual sense that is at the same time always held at bay, as if through the kind of blurring in Turner’s own nocturnes – an abstraction through complexity, of holding too much of the environment (the mist, the smoke, the shadow) in the image. Garet’s sound shares this additive logic, developing sheets of interpenetrating detail rather than reducing to a focal point.

“Sceneries” shares this emphasis on the visual, in both title and sound, starting with high piercing tones and an almost tidal recurrence of different drones, fading finally into what sounds like soft traffic. Returning to Debussy, we can hear how much of Garet’s work is also indebted to classical formal structure: each of the four works on “Four Malleable” are almost exactly 30 minutes long; each is structured in a progression of sections, one might say “movements”, that pass into each other more of less smoothly; and within each section there is a consistent micro-structure of multiple voices coming slowly into and out of focus in relation to one another. It is interesting to balance this apparent structure against what the liner notes suggest is a program of pure sound exploration without reference to any kind of external or generic model. What one finds coming from the sound is a rather more dynamic complex of factors, logics, and effects. It is very much a process which is unresolved, however, and so the pieces vary in their effects, or effectiveness. In the case of “Sceneries”, the work stays somewhat moored in its structure, each sound content to stay within some invisible boundary.

“From Modified Tapes”, perhaps the most interesting piece of the quartet, shows this unresolved tension between compositional logics in yet another way. The work is developed from partially erased and re-recorded cassette tapes, and it is bathed in that medium’s hazy mid-range hiss. It is fascinating to hear what is in many ways the backdrop to what might have been, the empty stage of low-fidelity sound, organized and magnified to the focus of listening. It is the most easily readable as a process-based piece, and yet it also begins to approach “Nocturne”’s Turner-esque sublime in its near-total landscape of what was once background noise. Until a moment at 18 minutes, however, when what sound like voices from the radio burble up in the mix. The effect is quite interesting, if vexing: the piece turns from a landscape back into a portrait, one might say: the voice is impossible to ignore or to assimilate into listening the same way one would any other type of abstract sound, and its gravity here is such that it forces all the surrounding and following sounds into relation with it. Noise becomes noise around the voice again, a frame, backdrop, or container, but no longer the thing-in-itself focus of the work’s being. It is in some ways a breaking of the integral character of the piece in favor of a counter-logic, or counterforce, that complicates the work and refuses to allow it to resolve or cohere totally.

This occurrence of spoken language in “From Modified Tapes” operates in a way similar to the release’s liner notes: it insists on a logic which the work overall is somehow interested in complicating, or subverting. The liner notes seem to disavow any referentiality in the work, for example, instead putting forth a rather self-evident list of sound qualities that Garet focuses on, including “time, pitch, timbre, amplitude… and structure”. But this is simply another way to say one is attending to the work, rather than a statement about what the work is. It functions more as a kind of dodge or feint away from meaning than any kind of engagement with it. One is left with the feeling that a potent subconscious force flows throughout this work that keeps elements in a fascinating tension, but at the same time holding them away from a full resolution of form. Or perhaps it is that the primary formal tension is precisely between conscious control and the free becoming of the material; between a knowing control and a calculated suspension of knowledge, in order to let the world breathe through the work, and perhaps by extension through the composer.

The material has its logic, its needs, and its formal tectonics, while Garet has his own, which like those of the material may perhaps only come to the surface slowly and through an intensive dynamic of friction, the results of which will eventually be called “the composition”. It is partly this uncertainty about the pieces, about how they arrived to us, whether through magic, calculation, or chance, that makes the process of encountering them so intriguing. (Andy Graydon)

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Igloo (November 2010): An astonishing talent continues rising as Richard Garet slowly unveils the richly embedded hues that encompass his latest release, Four Malleable. Broken into four stealthy long parts Nocturne offsets things from the top, long before we cross any bridge. A bit of a luminescent drone collage harkening early Thomas Köner. Lapping and drifting, then soaring it’s quite oceanic in scope, and a bit of head trip. It scales outward, feels quite expansive, yet subtly rocks the intimate side of the center of your chest. Deep bass rumbling makes way for something that simulates a creepy, low-fi invasive presence, then quiets to a hollow atonal frequency and elapses into static white noise like a fine mist waterfall. And that’s just track one. The remaining work follows suit, with high-pitched sine waves and molded experimentation. Two untitled tracks couldn’t be more different, one a bit unnerving dabbling in minimal crispy static while the other sounds like a document of floating in open space, muffled voices, et al. At thirty-one minutes 'Sceneries' is the lengthiest track here and doesn’t skimp on the tonal/pitch play of bells and motors that bring about both sounds of rapid intensity and breathy sensuality. Though take this one a half hour at a time, especially for beginners. If you’ve got a surround system this double disc set is a must — Instructions: play loud in low light. (TJ Norris)

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Paris Transatlantic (February 2010): A double CD featuring compositions dating between 2004 and 2009, Four Malleable is an excellent introduction to Richard Garet's strategies. One of the most noticeable traits of this artist's vision is the constant transition between different states, as, with a degree of analytical coldness, he designs platforms for sonic events to develop gradually yet unpredictably, giving the listener a chance to connect with a particular environment before becoming an active psychoacoustic participant in its progressive alteration. Several of these soundscapes tend towards instability only partially camouflaged by Garet's accurate placement of detail. 2005's "From Modified Tapes" explores settings that range from the accumulation of murmured pressure and reverberant vibration (substantial to the point of near-opacity) to the ever-puzzling seduction of remote metropolitan echoes. The processing filter lets emerge just a few identifiable factors – heavily equalized voices, in this case – from an unbearably dense fog hiding whatever meaning might lie behind. The composer declares to have been focussing on "materiality, malleability, process, and on the aural digital permutations resulted from computer synthesis". Yet the sharp nuances of certain frequencies, fused with the absence of physical weight typifying some of these pieces, dispel any doubt relative to concreteness, for in Garet's conception tactile matter seems to be a mere instrument for attempting an improved classification of our fundamental nature. (Massimo Ricci)

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Scrapyard Forecast (January 2010): Richard Garet is a name that I'm not all too familiar with. He's a visual artist from New York who creates scores of wonderful drone music as accompaniment to his films. His collaboration with Brendan Murray released in March entitled Of Distance is a big year end favourite amongst critics. That albums in the mail, but I can assure you that if its even remotely as good as Four Malleable, its would have probably ended up on this list too. Four Malleable is another album that turns its focus on the tactile drone, a sub genre that has recently ignited every flammable part of my psyche. Garet focuses a microscope on his compositions, the fading in and out of gritty minimalist fragments is only interrupted by pockets of mini-typhoon swells and extraterrestrial frequencies. Almost two hours of material here, and its all worth while.

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Just Outside (December 2009): Four pieces, each about 1/2 hour long, from 2004-2009. Garet is an expert in the art of the "grainy drone", taking sound sources that may be natural or industrial, usually with some amount of variegated texture, some particulate aspect, extending and layering them into sheets of sound many plies thick, the material always capable of being listened to on several levels, the re-listener likely to pick up aspects he missed the first few go-rounds. They often shift, as does the first track here, "Nocturne", from relatively consonant and soft to more abrasive and granular, though rarely if ever very harsh. The tracks are presented in reverse chronological order and, though I enjoyed them all to some degree, I really liked the older two the best; not sure what that says! Those earlier ones have a bit more grit and grime in the works, providing more of a textural variation between the sine hums and the detritus. The last track, "Imaginative Elements", also contains a kind of sparseness that's something of a tonic in relation to the earlier (later) ones. All would be nice to hear within a video environment, btw, which is how I've experienced his work on occasion. But on the whole, the four works are fine and excellent samples of both Garet's music and this neck of the sonic woods generally. Recommended! (Brian Olewnick)

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Aquarius Records (December 2009): Richard Garet is a multimedia artist who has been quite active in and around New York for many years now. Our only exposure to his work was by way of an excellent if under-appreciated collaboration with perennial AQ-favorite Brendan Murray entitled Of Distance, which came out earlier in 2009. Unfortunately, we missed out on a couple of Garet's earlier recordings on Non Visual Recordings and Winds Measure, but when and/OAR announced an album from Mr. Garet, we were quite intrigued. Given the strength of this recording, he's definitely making us reconsider going back and digging up those earlier records. This double disc set is a fantastic collection of hushed drone music, cracked silences, stacked tape hiss, controlled feedback, and stoic masses of gray noise.

The four extended pieces date from 2004-2009, and all exhibit a restrained aesthetic balancing an environmental stillness from various field recordings with the grandeur of minimalist strategies in composition. In many ways, it makes a lot of sense that Garet would be drawn to work with Brendan Murray, as both generate work that oozes with a hypnotic, wholly monochromatic sound design that could act as the soundtrack to a sandstorm as viewed from the other side of the Sahara Desert or to missile tests that are supposed to be hidden from public view. Something ominous is at hand in Garet's work, and the mystery as to what exactly 'it' is works to his advantage. Amidst these accumulations of layered textures and slow gravitational orbits of sonic detritus, Garet alludes to the swells of oceanic currents, the nocturnal buzzing of amassed insects, and reverberant echoes bellow from the depths of some underground bunker. All of which falls somewhere near Joe Colley, Tarab, John Duncan, and Coelacanth. So yeah, we dig it. Jim Hynes

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Downtown Music Gallery (December 2009): "Four Malleable" is four compositions containing four different sound sources, recorded in four different years, each ranging around the half-hour mark. All four tracks delve into the microsounds and drones that have been championed by fellow travelers with whom he shares some musical kinsmanship; Francisco Lopez, Brendan Murray, and the Onkyo crew. As Garet points a microscope at these small and delicate (possibly even decaying) sounds, it highlights the vibrant life of the nano world in which we barely encounter. He handles each tone with such precision and gentleness, guiding the frequencies deep into your ear canal to resonate your cranial cavity. A master at his craft and very impressive indeed! Job well done Senor Garet! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!! (Chuck Bettis)