Minimalism, repetition and noise – these are the trinity of elements found in the soul of Guesswork’s poetically reductive studies. With this project Jack Chuter, the Hard Return and ATTN:Magazine owner, specialises in slow, attentive experiments with noise synth, reverb pedal and feedback pedal, which blurs the boundaries between music and non-music.
Building on a number of self-releases in 2023, whereby the titles hint towards their emotive genesis – Grasp Reflex, Clarity In Fatigue, Margin of Error – Head Crash became Guesswork’s first major work presented on the TOOL USE imprint. Perpetually at a possible point of collapse, this release highlights what Guesswork’s modus operandi seems to be: a reduction of intervention and the role of the composer, in lieu of allowing a set of variables to just be, to breathe.
Paired together as symbolic twins trapped in limbo, ‘Laughter Valve / Unhappy Paths’ is the latest and most satisfying statement by Guesswork yet. Released on Manchester’s Square Ears label, the double album length work of prolonged uncertainties for pedals and spitting electronics was created using synthesiser, pitch shifter, distortion pedal, feedback pedal and reverb pedal.
Laughter Valve is a 50-minute and what seems to be continuous take which stutters into life after a few moments of hushed room tone. There appears to be two main components to what we are hearing: a consistent high frequency that hovers over a buzzing lower one. Wavy Gravy, an American entertainer and peace activist best known for his role at Woodstock, once said “Laughter is the valve on the pressure cooker of life.” With his point being either you laugh and suffer or you are doomed to fail. On Laughter Valve it feels as if the theoretical valve in question is being held tightly shut and ever so slowly the pressure is incremental building.
Borrowing from some of the aesthetic and themes of ambient noise wall, Guesswork explores unnerving textures and a sonic stasis which appears to remain consistent throughout the pieces, and in doing so, creating a claustrophobic and hypnotic trance. Close your eyes and you might begin to imagine shapes and colours, see developing patterns in the dense tonalities. It may even feel meditative or evoke a transcendental experience like listening to white noise can, allowing listeners to lean into the ferocious repetition as a tapestry for meditation or deep concentration.
The seemingly never-ending high-pitched whirring in Laughter Valve could be connotative of a chiming car alarm or a slow burn tinnitus attack. While the lower pitched stumbling textures could signify galloping clipped horse hoofs, listening to a baby’s heartbeat, a nervous pulse coupled with palpitations, popping popcorn, a tapped phone line, amplified air molecules, pulsating static, signals intersecting with radio waves, insect stridulation, a frantic dance. Whatever you may or may not hear appears to stay the same and remain in situ while simultaneously being in slow flux, shifting, jittering and juggling between micro tones and audible void wells.
An alternative way of listening to Laughter Valve is by viewing David Curington’s – Square Ear’s owner – video, which appears to remain focused on a corner of room, at the point where walls meet the ceiling (echoing some of Guesswork’s early release artwork), while pixelated textures in muted rainbow watercolour tones flicker and bleed, varying in hue and density like a thermal camera across its runtime.
With a similar runtime, Unhappy Paths is more sombre and brooding than Laughter Valve. And like the preceding piece, sounds and experiences come to the fore upon allowing the experience to submerge you. A church bell clanging in the distance buried beneath a dense smog, a wind blowing against a rattling lamppost, a vibrating rusted piece of sheet metal, locked vinyl grooves, skipping TV static, a spluttering motorboat engine. Both of these pieces are abstract, works of art that offers routes for the listener to take on face value or to impart their own meanings and interpretations of what they might be hearing.
Consider Laughter Valve and Unhappy Paths as a thematic pair of Rothko’s colour paintings. Think about the iconic Seagram Murals, the Black-Form paintings or Black on Grey paintings. On his colour fields, Rothko said that “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on,” and believed that his work, similar to Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return, could offer viewers a timeless, transcendent experience.
There are similarities in the unwavering tone of what has been presented between Rothko’s painted works and Guesswork’s aural landscapes. Rothko used colour as the primary means to evoke a spiritual reaction from viewers. While Chuter replaces colour on their stuttering canvas with layers flooded in a deeply mono palette. There is such a slow conscious awareness of decay permeating every fibre of Laughter Valve / Unhappy Paths that upon listening it may evoke a poignant sense of transience.
Laughter Valve / Unhappy Paths can be purchased digitally from Square Ear’s Bandcamp.
Ryan Hooper
MEANS 