Ajax Ensemble by N Chambers

A compilation of mostly previously released material for subscribers of this channel only, in addition to one or two from digital compilations. A new approach has been made in an attempt to present these tracks in a new, more consistent theme and light. -Norm Chambers

“I’m just in a different zone lately. Up at 2am playing synths, going a little delirious.” — Norm Chambers via text message, October 11, 2022

Norm Chambers’ music, like life itself, emerged from the sea. From 2009’s self-released Nordsee (German for North Sea) and its opening track Applied Oceanographics, to the first Panabrite concert in 2010, which featured projected video of ocean life, on through the next decade-plus during which Chambers released a sonic tsunami comprising dozens of releases, the ocean served as a metaphorical setting for much of his output. His music provides a gravity-free medium in which the listener may float, suspended, carried along by pulsating currents in the company of varicolored life forms illuminated by waves of refracted light. His ability to channel biotic patterns through the petrochemical-mineral-electric nodes of his synthesizer array delineated an implicit conceptual arc linking Proterozoic aquatic pasts with speculative techno-futures influenced by science fiction cinema from the 1970s — films such as The Andromeda Strain and Phase IV that served as reservoirs of stylistic guidance to which he would return regularly.

It is at once too facile and impossible to avoid hearing these final works by Norm in the context of his cancer, the treatment for which immersed him in an environment of alien-seeming technologies scanning and probing his body. He was keenly attuned to the aesthetic dimensions of these encounters and would share photos and stories after each new procedure — hospital machinery that appeared simultaneously benevolent and menacing, the unfamiliar demands placed up on his body by each procedure, exotic technical terms that sometimes reappeared as titles of works (Positron Emission Tomography). As his illness progressed, his body became lighter, as though trying to free itself from Earth’s gravitational pull. So many of his titles alluded to flight, floating, or transitions from one state to another — “Levitation Phase,” “Infinite Passage,” “Hover Over, ” and on and on — it seems only fitting that his final transition would yield music of this depth and elegance.
—RM Francis

Electronic composer based in Seattle.

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