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Originally released on cassette by Corpus Hermeticum (Hermes003), 1994. All sounds by Alastair Galbraith and Bruce Russell.
"New Zealand is on summer holidays all through the month of January. For some reason I had the house to myself, the wife and kids were elsewhere. Alastair Galbraith brought over some instruments and we plugged in a cassette recorder. We spent the sunny afternoon setting up combinations of instruments and seeing what happened.
We had recorded the Concord LP the year before and done two gigs at the Empire tavern that became The Philosophick Mercury. The idea of Dust was taking shape through experimental practice. Some of it worked better than other bits, but it all made sense as a collage of sound, pointing in the direction of freedom. Our collective practice was making leaps and bounds; and starting to get heard abroad. In Australia the young Jon Dale was listening:
'The Eightness Of Adam Qadmon was one of the first releases I heard from A Handful of Dust… I've always been drawn to this cassette for its utterly unique, acroamatic sensibility - it seems less interested in third-eye-rupturing … and more about a late night session, bleeding into early morning, under the influence of heady wisdom and headier substances… What we had here was very much the real deal, collective and solo eviscerations from the heart of sound itself. I love it, unconditionally.'
Jon got the time of day wrong, but not much else. Going back to this session recently, I became aware of the strange, ungainly and unrepeatable shapes our practice assumed during these first forays into total free improvisation. Re-mastered with help from Lasse Marhaug, at the request of some visionary Finns; here Adam Qadmon, the ur-Golem, comes again. Walking from the graveyard of the past, blinking in the autumn sun, and shaking twenty-five years of clay from his coat."

Satoshi and Nao performed their live “Diskordant” using their analog machines and object-activated sounds in front of the New York crowd. These sounds are transformed and improvised through reconstruction and sample synthesis.

Able Noise are a cross-continent duo based between The Hague (nl) and Athens (gr), built around the experimental baritone guitar and drum playing of George Knegtel and Alex Andropoulos. After a few formative attempts at collaboration, they officially came together as the Able Noise we see now in 2017, uniting over shared thoughts on art and performance encountered while studying at The Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. Their first recorded work, a seamless 30 minutes of glistening post-rock anti-formalism, emerged in low-key fashion in 2020 as a cassette through Glasgow’s famed Glarc label. Numerous European wide tours and left-of-centre festival appearances led the pair back to the studio for the recording of debut LP, High Tide, to be released via World of Echo on 1st November.

The shift to a studio environment was a significant one, since Able Noise was primarily conceived as a live band, thinking of and writing for the live concert experience specifically. Consider their practice an Active Performance of sorts, one that seeks to challenge understandings of the medium of the live arena, how its properties and limitations can be addressed creatively, and the dialogical relationship between performer and the audience. Those who have caught them live will have witnessed very physical yet malleable performances, shaped each time by the context at hand, be that the time of day, the acoustic properties of the space, and the shared energy of the assembled patrons.

True to this approach, the pair have embarked upon the recording of their debut album with a similar exploratory impetus. In a studio without a physical audience to confront, the questions are suddenly quite different: how does one create a definitive recorded music initially rooted in improvisation, how is that recording then listened to and understood, and, without the spectacle of performance, how is it possible to work with the sense of hearing alone. Unsurprisingly, the music of High Tide is significantly different to that of an Able Noise live set. Minimalism has been traded for a detail-oriented approach, the limitations of two sets of hands suddenly lifted by the possibilities of multi-tracked thinking, post-production and various processing techniques. Real-time gives way to fragmentation, distortion and dilation, and the shift is notable - High Tide is a woozy and often disorientating listen that plays quick and easy with conventional notions of structure, at once both centreless and impressionistic, yet somehow guided by an imagined formless space.

Reliant much less on their own capabilities - and limitations! - as musicians, Knegtel and Andropoulos heartily invited the contributions of friends from both their local Athenian music community and those made while playing the UK, with the important disclaimer given that anything played during the recording session will not sound the same once on record. The result is duos, trios, quartets and sextets playing in different experiences of time, and on dynamic scales vastly different from one another, brought to equal footing.

Critically, the wholesomeness of their creative communion belies the darker theme of inertia that the pair acknowledge runs throughout the album, a sense of bodies of very different weights and momentums existing alongside each other, either adapting to or clashing with one another. In short, the outside world can’t help but seep in, even as you create within your own hermetic universe - the feeling of hopelessness amidst endless political and social strife, obsolescence in the face of technological development, time’s inexorable march. These are things we’ve all felt, and while High Tide, like much before it, doesn’t provide any definitive resolution for these challenges, it does present its own set of unique possibilities written in the shared language of its creators.