Strange Seeds Come from Odd Flowers

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Augur (S. Brand) and Birds of Tin (B. Oates), emerging here from the recesses of the experimental cassette underground, immediately bring to mind nothing less than the miraculous synergy which once produced :zoviet*france: in Newcastle and Life Garden in Tuscon. A shared interest in "nature and intuition" brings Augur and Birds of Tin together, a bridge between the naturalistic coarseness of Brand's roughly hewn loops and Oates' fascination with the digital refinement of tiny, idealized sounds. Together they map a realm of sonic experience where texture has usurped form and definition has become a precept of the tactile rather than the visual. There's surprisingly little repetition in their flowering improvisations, life's rich tapestry regarded not as a sum of its natural interwoven patterns but as the coincidence of countless small-but-significant events. Overgrown with fanciful flora and teeming with impossible fauna, these gardens are as fertile and unsullied as a virgin Eden - young worlds of extraordinary natural possibility. An ominous human presence lurks at the fringes of Oates' solo "Translations, Rotations and Reflections," surveying the landscape with an arrogant eye (in all likelihood calculating how its riches might be plundered and the land itself parceled and sold). In Brand's solo pieces, Man is a more benign intruder, a distracted observer too caught up in his mundane industrious concerns to pay more than cursory attention to the vital ecospheric hum of a forest primeval or to appreciate the trills and tremolos of fantastic birds.