It is clear from the opening sample that there is a lot going on with this rich and languorous record. <i>In all possible places at once</i> is built up from a smörgåsbord of (de)tunings, synths, lap steel guitar, a zither, a steel hand drum, specially commissioned instruments made by Yuri Landman, a fair number of in situ, or found sounds, and birdsong samples. During its making, Liew Niyomkarn wanted “to feel the delicate resonance of those instruments, tuned specifically, bouncing back and forth between my bedroom walls.” Niyomkarn also looked to draw an auditory memory bridge between her native Thailand and her current Brussels base. But (as the title states), the sounds combine to create a boundary-free transfer of sound and emotion in their most primal forms, where the listener can plot a course through their own sonic and psychic hinterlands.
However vague or abstract they are, you find yourself sucked into these sound worlds and unable to dismiss them. What could be a chopped up sample of deep breathing introduces the opener, ‘before the lightning strike’. It is a soporific note on which to begin; there to lower our heart rate and calm us before we glide through a beautiful floating composition. Artfully conceived to linger on the edge of our consciousness, what we hear could be anything. It’s down to us: at one point the instrumentation combines to invoke a mellotron, a track that conjures up a lost passage from Tangerine Dream’s <i>Atem</i>. All too soon it’s over.
Eden would not be complete with a serpent. ‘shiny soft and clear’ follows and is, by contrast, a slightly foreboding piece; the single note stabs from the keyboard set a paranoid note from the off, and the expressionless vocals have a kind of sinister, Hal-like quality to them, part observation, part command. Over time these key sounds become more fragmented and blurred, agents of mild confusion that seemingly pick up on the words we hear – which talk of things “evaporating, shattering, deflating and deflating; right back to you.”
From then on, the record takes these suggestions to heart and dissolves into a procession of sounds with a beginning and an end which could, at a stretch, be called tracks. The following numbers, ‘blue high’, ‘roots’, ‘external view’ and ‘feels like liquidity’ all play with a single idea to the point of abstraction. Things are happening, though a lot of the music does feel as if it needs to be examined through a powerful lens.
The zither on the title track acts as a wake-up call. The shimmering notes, and the vibrations carried through the silences around them, dispel the cool mists of sound built up by the preceding tracks. A voice appears, backed by what sounds detuned strumming, telling us to tune into a “deeper reality.” Then we return to more abstract pieces that collectively act like a warm bath. Infused by the scents and steams created by the various sounds they pivot around, ‘a tangent, a reminder’, ‘comet of curiosity’, and ‘a denser medium’ all serve to turn off your mind and float downstream. One track that cuts through the vapours is ‘at Bird’s house’, where we hear the aforementioned steel hand drum, recorded in situ as the sounds of everyday life swirl around. It’s a beautiful, almost transcendent moment.
Last track, ‘ritual of a boat’ starts off like ‘Landebahn’ from Moebius and Plank’s album, <i>Rastakraut Pasta</i>, but grows steadily in volume and falls prey to all sorts of sonic discombobulation. Eventually it returns to the melancholy twang of the lap steel guitar. A case, like the rest of this beguiling album, of sound being both very much, and not, what it appears to be.
