Matt Wuethrich (The Wire #314, April 2010, p.30)
Who is Eleh? It’s a simple enough question, but an email to the object of it elicits the following reply: “At this time I would prefer to let the records speak for themselves”. The statement is characteristic of how Eleh has chosen to present its sound art to the world: stark, humble, a direct challenge to how listeners and critics discuss music – and more than a little disingenuous.
In many respects, Eleh’s approach to sound and identity is a reformulation of many past and present gambits from popular as well as experimental music: the Cageian decree to allow the sounds to do all the communicating; the anonymity common to the Industrial and Noise undergrounds as well as hiphop and club music; the more recent fascination with drone forms and analogue synthesis. While Eleh’s sound is more physical than Cage’s concepts, and its drone purer and heavier than many modern counterparts, the anonymity is more problematic. Ostensibly, it is a way of increasing a listener’s focus on the sound; yet insisting on facelessness becomes a distraction in itself. Some have called Eleh mysterious, but given the effort to remain hidden, elusive would be more accurate.
The 12 Eleh LPs to date reveal no hard facts, but the letterpressed sleeves, almost invariably printed in metallic silver and black, contain a wealth of information, visual as well as sonic. The Op Art inspired designs of John Brien evoke the legendary Perspectives Musicales series released by EMI in the late 1960s and early 70s. Titles combine mystic abstraction, technological detail and devotional sentiment. And each offers come variation on Eleh’s only direct verbal message to listeners, such as: “Pure Tone. Pure Sound. Pure Volume. Pure analog. Dedicated to LaMonte Young”. Taken from its debut release Floating Frequencies / Intuitive Synthesis I (Important 2006), it shows that all the elements of Eleh’s sound and concept are present from the start. There’s the commitment to analogue sources and reproduction; the importance of high volume; the quest for sound unburdened by ego; the awareness of the minimalist electronic tradition (two more volumes are dedicated to Charlemagne Palestine and Pauline Oliveros) and the suggestion, contained in the Roman numeral ‘I’, that Eleh’s vision is openended.
The insistence on purity, however, feels at once over-ambitious and self-limiting [...]. Eleh is concerned more with density here than texture or subtlety. But such density cannot overcome the impression that these are little more than technical studies [...].
Simultaneously cerebral and visceral, Eleh returns to us, in Wozencraft’s estimation, “the pleasure of discovering something for oneself, of testing the parameters of one’s appreciation and going beyond the usual references”. Even so, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that Eleh has actually cut listeners off from the satisfaction of arriving at a personal interpretation by forcing them to navigate the narrow references printed on its limited-run vinyl releases; it’s as if Eleh were at times playing hide and seek with listeners, rather than allowing them to explore the music themselves. That is why Eleh’s Touch recordings feel like its most liberating, as they release Eleh from two tightly held constraints on its identity: the letterpress sleeve designs and the analogue-only policy.
The Location Momentum CD presents the clearest, most unified view yet of Eleh’s vision. The more diverse tonal and timbral range, sculptural form and untamed energy found on Eleh’s most satisfying releases are all present and thoroughly synthesised into an immersive, mesmeric whole. Aided by the uninterrupted flow that the digital medium allows, and unburdened by any attachment to a medium or method of production, our idea of Eleh is allowed to expand. Now that Eleh has stopped being so elusive, it is again becoming mysterious.
