Remissions by Dimmer

Recorded live in California at Norcal Noisefest (Sacto), The Luggage Store Gallery (SF), The Smell (LA) and Noise Pancakes (SF).

AQUARIUS RECORDS

Not to be confused with the Dimmer that was born from NZ's Straightjacket Fits, this Dimmer brings together two stalwarts of the California experimental community: Thomas Dimuzio and Joseph Hammer. The former skirts the boundaries between electro-acoustic technologies and improvisational abstraction, having collaborated with the likes of Chris Cutler, Matmos, Wobbly, Scott Arford, Illusion Of Safety and countless others. Mr. Hammer is one of the prominent members of the willfully oblique Los Angeles Free Music Society, having participated in such projects as Solid Eye, Points Of Friction, and Steaming Coils. Hammer's instrument of choice is the reel-to-reel tape deck, through which he can muster an uncanny palette of sound, noise, and drone. The two have worked together off and on for a good part of the last decade, with a handful of performances throughout California and a couple of releases - Remissions being their second and collecting some of the best moments from those live gigs."Sky Wire" builds insectoid buzzes and creepily harmonic drones out of the interplay between Hammer's rough-hewn tape manipulation and Dimuzio's deftly rendered swells, somewhere between Machinefabriek and Christoph Heemann. "Sun Dog" grafts blackened noise onto an electrocutioner's hum, with Hammer's start 'n' stop tapes popping into view like a detached Burroughs cut-up. Both "Gases That Emit Light" and "Giant Eagle" continue along these same strategies with eerie clouds of drones that fold and collapse between harmonic resonance and dissonance with unsettled bursts of soft focus noise. This is really exceptional stuff, and certainly some of the best that we've encountered from either artists individually.

VITAL WEEKLY

It may sound like a new name, and half of it also is. Dimmer is a duo of Thomas Dimuzio and one Joseph Hammer. This double LP set is the follow up to a CD on Melon Expander which I didn't hear. Each of the four sides has a live recording, three from 2006 and one from 2007. Dimmer uses live sampling, processing, feedback, looping (Dimuzio) and tape manipulation and processing (Hammer). This is pretty interesting music. All four pieces show something that could be labeled as 'band sound'. The careful tape manipulations of Hammer, making the tape go 'wobbly' against the heads, set against a scary set of subdued electronics. A record to turn up the volume as things seem rather 'low' here, but once a bit louder reveal a lot of hidden detail. Scary, spooky stuff, with dark atmospheric undercurrent. Of the four pieces 'Giant Eagle' is my favorite here with its somewhat more clear tape sounds, and scraping, feedback like rusty metal sound, whereas the other three seem to be moving more along side one specific idea and are throughout more minimal. Excellent sci-fi soundtrack stuff at work here, save then perhaps for the piece I like which works really fine by itself. An excellent record.

THE ONE TRUE DEAD ANGEL

Dimmer is the collaborative project of Thomas Dimuzio and Joseph Hammer, and this brooding double-lp is their second release (the first, THE SHINING PATH, was released in 2007 on Melon Expander). What you get here are four side-long pieces, ranging from approximately thirteen to fifteen minutes each, all recorded live in various locations from 2006 to 2007. DiMuzio handles the live sampling, processing, feedback, and looping; Hammer provides tape manipulation and more processing. "Sky Wire" is up first, recorded at Norcal Noisefest in Sacramento on October 15, 2006; buoyed by vaporous drone and mild, burbling electronics, it's a beautiful exercise in gradually expanding drones that slowly but surely increase in volume and intensity. Driven mainly by feedback, at its most intense the tone has a sinister edge, but mostly it sounds very much like the wire music of Alan Lamb or Alvin Lucier -- mellow and carried by the wind, otherworldly without being oppressive. After reaching a peak of loudness and intensity, it ends in a muted swirl of electronics and mild hovering drone that rises and falls before fading away entirely. "Sun Dog," recorded at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco on March 30, 2006, offers drones in a more mechanical vein, with a sound whose droning, muted feedback is augmented by minimal, hissing electronics. At some points the electronic element rises to the forefront with brief bursts of grinding, cheeping hiss, occasionally with enough violence to nearly overwhelm the omnipresent drone. About halfway through the piece the drone and the hiss converge in a nice harmonic sound, only to drift away again into separate audio components. Over the rest of the piece, the electronic element becomes more subdued and the drone more pronounced, slowly decreasing in volume until there's nothing left... at which a buzzing hum fades up briefly, only to recede again as the almighty drone takes hold one more time over a muted sample, with everything ending in a wash of broken noise and washed-out squealing noises that fade slowly into the background before dying out altogether. "Gases That Emit Light," recorded at The Smell in Los Angeles on August 26, 2006, opens with shrill feedback and rumbling noises that grow louder and thicker, until the sound resembles a mildly distorted pipe organ or analog synthesizer accompanied by subsonic rumbling. This titanic sound eventually segues into a field of deep floating drones and a noise akin to a foghorn or sonic beacon. The tail end of this piece, which sounds at times more like a processed field recording of waves lapping in the ocean amid the slow movement of ships, is one of the strongest examples of the duo's ability to create processed sound with an organic core. The cathedral-like vibe returns at the end, along with drones that sound like violins. The final piece, "Giant Eagle," is the longest one at 15:29, and the most sonically varied. Recorded at Noise Pancakes in San Francisco on April 8, 2007, it opens with chopped-up electronic noises in addition to peals of wavering drone, and drifts through several movements of different directions in electronic sound. The segues from one movement to the next are natural, not forced, with an effect like oscilloscopes drifting into different ranges of tonal variety over time as the powerful drone action surges forward and recedes; the sound is not violent, but far less static than some of the other pieces, with new sound patterns and tones being introduced on a regular basis. Here the drone is subservient to the electronic experimentation. The drone never completely disappears, but it is far less important than the ever-changing wheel of sound provided by the electronic gadgets and processing. The muted, low-key ending -- a near-imperceptible and wavelike drone seasoned with a sprinkling of electronic noise -- is one of the most subtle moments of the entire double-album, and a fitting conclusion. As with everything else on Isounderscore, this is a high-quality avant listening experience, and comes on heavy-grade vinyl with sharp packaging. It's also limited to 500 copies.

SCRAPYARD FOREST

The two responsible for this lovely double lp offering are Thomas Dimuzio and Joseph Hammer, two prominent figures in the robust community of Californian improv and experimentalism. Of the two, I'm more familiar with Dimuzio's work, his Sonicism 2xcd release and last year's Upcoming Events, a collab with Dan Burke released on No Fun, are both fantastic efforts. On Remissions, Dimuzio and Hammer blend their skills flawlessly, Hammer handling the analog tape manipulations while Dimuzio utilizes feedback, loops and archaic processing. The outcome is a dimensional rift, a bending of time through the trans-formative arrangement of sonic minutiae. Looped hushed drone fragments are sped up and slowed down and at times they are completely taken apart and stacked atop a dissolving bed of multi-coloured noise. The four side long tracks on Remissions are actually a collection of live concert takes between 2006 and 2007 in California, a solidified conformation of the adeptness of these two musicians. One of 2009's best records.

DIMMER is a duo comprising live sampling pioneer Thomas Dimuzio and tape-loop maestro Joseph Hammer. Captivating audiences with their dark explorations of sound, Dimmer specializes in a symbiotic sound process as they continually loop, reloop, sample and resample within an interactive feedback circuit linking both artists.