Albert Van Abbe - Nondual (2022)

More than five years since his debut album, sound artist Albert van Abbe now presents NONDUAL on Raster – a contribution so perfectly tailored to the platform that it is hard to conceive it is his first. NONDUAL will be out in February 2022 alongside DUAL, a remarkable collaboration with the label’s co-founder Olaf Bender (Byetone).

NONDUAL has been inspired by nondualism. The term refers to the recognition that what we essentially are, behind this seeming multiplicity and diversity of objects, others and selves, is a single indivisible reality. With NONDUAL, van Abbe presents the listener with an opportunity to sonically explore this realization.

The entrance to van Abbe’s nondual universe is a Cellar Closet. And yes, there is a portal deep inside, but it doesn’t lead to any kind of Narnia that C. S. Lewis would recognize. Rather, you’re presented with 14 consecutive landscapes made up of the architecture and infrastructure of yourself, on a nano-mechanical level. Sharp tapping cadences, sudden bursts of acidic noise, deep resonating oscillations – the sounds of the beyond microscopic machinery that makes us all tick. The scenery is wild but never chaotic: blistering rhythmical pulses collide with ethereal ivory harmonies, creating movement and balance, creating us. On this level, it’s plain to see that we’re all the same – in a literal sense. The rest is just a question of magnification and ego.

Played and exhibited as an audiovisual project in the new ∄ Club Concert Hall in Kiev, Ukraine as well as NXT Museum Amsterdam, NONDUAL is a new live audiovisual performance, a realtime 4K+ flexible visual synthesizer based on Andreas Nicolas Fisher's Supervoid series played in conjunction with the NONDUAL soundtrack.

NONDUAL was conceived at the Willem Twee Studio in 's-Hertogenbosch, where van Abbe also utilized a grand 'DIY' prepared piano in the adjacent concert hall, extensively sampling Beste Aydin (Nene H). The album was further mixed and engineered with Byetone at Funkhaus in Berlin. Jochem Paap (Speedy J) did the mastering for the album, the first full mastering project outside of his own material at STOOR in Rotterdam. A dream come true for van Abbe.