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Meredith Bates — The Obsever Effect, Books I & II
(Bandcamp Phonometrograph no#, 2026, 2CD / DL)

by Jon Davis, Published 2026-04-13

The Obsever Effect, Books I & II Cover art

Meredith Bates is back with a follow-up to her sprawling Tesseract album from 2023, and she’s showing no signs of abandoning her quest for lengthy soundscapes. The Observer Effect is another double CD set packed to the brim with slow-moving tone poems constructed with her own violin, viola, field recordings, and electronics; a few guests join her on certain tracks: Scott Morgan (AKA loscil), Chris Gesstrin, and Curtis Andrews contribute electronics, synthesizer, and percussion here and there throughout the set, which clocks in well over two hours in length. This electroacoustic music inhabits a zone adjacent to ambient music, full of long tones and droning notes that come and go at a leisurely pace, sneaking into the awareness like approaching fog, passing by, and fading away, overlapped and replaced by other notes, each with a timbre of its own, be it violin or something less recognizable. Echoing noises inhabit the far reaches, little scrapes and scritches that quietly punctuate the sound world. Three of the tracks stretch beyond a half hour, but this isn’t music for counting the seconds — it’s more like the harmonic breathing of a giant creature that produces magical and varying tones as the air goes in and out of its massive body. This is a case where saying the music feels timeless means that each piece seems to have existed forever, outside of time, and we’re just encountering them as we move around in a multidimensional path, approaching them one by one, lingering with them for a time, then moving on to the next eternal piece, which has also always been there — we just couldn’t hear it from a distance. Listening to The Observer Effect is like stepping outside of time, and in a world that moves much too fast for any of us to be truly comfortable, that’s not a bad thing.

Filed under: New releases, 2026 releases

Related artist(s): Meredith Bates

More info
http://meredithbates.bandcamp.com/album/the-observer-effect-books-i-ii

 

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