(2021) Tim Story - Threads (1981, Reissue)



Review:
Tim Story made Threads at the dawn of the 1980s, alone, in a basement apartment in Ohio, experimenting with a Tascam 4-track reel to reel recorder, a piano, a junk shop vibraphone, a PAiA synth constructed from a kit, a guitar and a Yamaha CS-30. There he recorded these eerie, luminous tracks, where surging surfs of low-end synth sound roil under music box melodies of pristine clarity, where church organ solemnity coincides with soft, slow arpeggios sustained so that after tones shimmer with almost as much solidity as the main notes. Within a few years, Story would be collaborating with German ambient pioneers like Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Mobius, and indeed this early work has some of the glowing electro-lyricism of Cluster or Ulrich Schnauss; it is spectral and disconcertingly beautiful. The album would have been released in 1981 if all had gone well. Story sent cassette demos to a few labels and got a bite from Klaus Schulze, who ran the Atem label, which handled This Heat, Univers Zero and Art Zoyd out of Paris. Schulze was looking to start a new imprint called Labyrinthes focused on electronic instrumental music and got as far as a test pressing with Threads before folding, leaving the music in limbo. By the time Story found another label, this time the Norwegian Uniton, he had another album’s worth of music in hand; he released In Another Country with them instead in 1983. Threads fell by the wayside, though the European ambient/electronic label Eurock launched reissues in 1992 and 1996. This new reissue presents Story’s earliest work in lucid clarity, allowing delicate tone-washes and trebly keyboard figures to unspool serenely, full of light that seems to glow from within. Although you don’t hear much piano in most tracks—“Scene and Artifact” is the exception—you can tell that Story’s sensibility was shaped by the instrument. The chords and melodies and counterparts feel very pianistic, even where they are clearly played on other keyboards. Whatever the instrument, Story favors the lingering sounds created by a sustain pedal; his notes dissolve, but don’t disappear. Story’s music has a folktale-ish quality that mixes dread and wonder, as on lovely “The Moors” where music box chimes and pennywhistle tones step tentatively top darker chillier currents of synthesized sound. At one point, a tone very much like an oboe—though god knows how he made it—snakes out of shifting, twinkling auras of sound, a sinuous, witchy curve in its deep resonant magic. “Iso” is, perhaps, the prettiest of these tracks, soft, indefinite bloops of sound dropping into shivering foundations of reedy sustain, very much like warm rain pattering down on an ocean. More muscular sounds erupt later, a frayed guitar-like timbre pushing up and out of the nursery room calm. Story is frequently lumped into the New Age category, and, indeed, his work has a wonderfully calming, radiant quality. Yet there’s a rigor and architecture in this cuts that’s pretty far from what plays at your typical neighborhood alternate healing space, and an undercurrent of, if not exactly menace, at least a chilling unknowability. After Threads, Story went on to work with Rodelius and Mobius, to experiment with sound installations and to compose for film and TV. He is still working, still in Ohio, still pushing the conjuncture of natural and synthetic sound. This first album was only the beginning, but it is a very beautiful beginning and full of promise.



Tracklist:
01 - Tethered By a Thread
02 - The Moors
03 - Burst
04 - A Thousand Whispers
05 - Scene and Artifact
06 - Without Waves
07 - Iso
08 - Reprise


Media Report:
Genre: ambient
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits