HAPTIC - Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions (2024)

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For Haptic’s latest release, the group has once again contracted to a trio. What would eventually become 'Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions' began with discussions and email exchanges in preparation for a recording session at Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) in April 2022. In lieu of a fixed score or set agenda for the session, a wide range of possible models from which to draw inspiration were discussed, particularly focusing on those records that had formed each member’s earliest musical influences.

Ultimately, however, the finished album would have only the most tenuous connection to these original sources. Taking the ESS session as a point of departure, the individual pieces gradually evolved through a lengthy process of distillation and concentration. Rough mixes were assembled and exchanged back and forth among the group, reviewed, and discussed. The decision was made to extract certain aspects of the initial recordings and focus on refining particular sounds, moods, and compositional approaches. Various new elements were incorporated—field recordings, additional electronics, piano—and, after further consideration, usually taken away again. Over an extended period, as the individual tracks were mixed, remixed, and revised in search of consensus, the process of accretion and reduction resulted in an abraded, polished surface, richly and subtly textured but shorn of ornament.

Serving as a brief introduction and setting the stage for what is to follow, “Proscenium” is built around a warped cassette tape of improvised piano. This recording is combined with a horn part, drawn from an arrangement of a work by Guillaume de Machaut, carefully rearranged to align with the piano recording. The scene shifts abruptly as “Returning” begins. The sound of a restless crowd provides an anticipatory interlude before the curtain rises on the distended, slow-motion dissolution of a fragment of lush orchestral music. The album’s final piece, “Abasement,” sustains its hovering stasis for an impossibly long, suspended moment, punctuated with precisely deployed bass drum hits that give the piece a sense of form, mass, and almost glacial momentum. Alternately transparent and opaque, 'Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions' beautifully articulates Haptic’s deeply considered approach to recorded sound and acts as a fitting summation of their career to date.