Oblivion is a nonplace. A radio dial wandering away from the crisp enunciation of the broadcast, choosing instead to strand itself in the ambiguity of dead air. Over a fleeting 12-minutes, sound artist Nhung Nguyen avoids allegiance to anything concrete or explicitly communicative. Keyboards spiral away from any tonal centre. Voices, scrapes and gurgles arrive heavily manipulated, removed from the context that gifts them significance, bobbing like curious flotsam upon a sea of crackle and hum. Couple this with the mentions of “abandoned memories” and “lost times” in the record’s accompanying description, and the composition starts to manifest as a purgatory for forgotten experiences, occupied by sounds that have slipped through the net of remembering. It’s with masterful irony that Nguyen generates this sense of placelessness from the most grounded of source materials: found sounds, field recordings of physical spaces…
read the whole thing at: echoes and dust.