Tomas Phillips - Limit_Fold (2016)

LINE is happy to have artist Tomas Phillips return for his second LINE release since 2006’s haunting composition Intermission / Six Feuilles (LINE_029).

Limit_Fold extends Tomas Phillips’s aesthetic of minimal through-composition that seeks a balance between electronic and acoustic sound sources and foregrounds active listening. Sparse koto notes and melodies interact with low end drones, digital, staccato flares, and abrupt string swells in a single 40 minute piece in which relative silence is given form. As in his previous work, central to the music’s ethos is the further juxtaposition of organic, meditative warmth and the immediacy of tension arising from small incursions into an otherwise soft, sonic palate; such tension that might be indicative of the sharper edges of interiority. The title draws inspiration from Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s essay “L’urgence et la patience” about the two ostensibly discordant but overlapping components of writing, or composing: the urgency to push against limits of time and capacity, and the patience that folds gently over on itself to bring a text to fruition.