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 EXPERIMENTAL/ELECTRONIC PREVIEW Cloudbursting The atmospheric musical brainstorms of ambient sound sculptor Jeff Greinke move with the fluidity of intense weather patterns and the lucidity of dark, heavy dreams. Surround yourself in the dense sound.
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Jeff Greinke, Matt McCormick, Mager, Larold Will and Jennifer Robin Snake & Weasel, 1720 SE 12th Ave., 232-8338 8 pm Friday, March 12 $5 Spinning somewhere in a dream. My unconscious mind hears--no, doesn't hear, merely understands the existence of--percussion in the background, bubbling in a rhythm simultaneously exotic and familiar. Sacred and profane. A voice whispers in my ear. No, it's the wind. Now it's the eternal hum of a machine. Rain replaces the beat, drumming on the trees, rooftops, sidewalks; it becomes its own pulse and then fades. Perhaps it wasn't ever there. Perhaps it was something different washing over me in sound waves, immersing me in noise and nuance. Skip to song number 2.... And so it goes listening to the music of Jeff Greinke. For nearly 20 years, this Seattle resident has dipped his hand into the womb of ambient sonics and birthed music from alternate planes of reality, ones that lie in the shadows just beneath the safety blanket of consensus truth. Greinke sees these regions of the mind as "strange and beautiful places." The creations born within are quietly bizarre, recognizable for one instant, indefinable the next. Deep electronic drones float with heavy, humid weight or rise with misty grace; barely-heard sampled voices chatter and sing; a drum or metallic clank pierces the veil, only to vanish a few minutes later. At the music's most placid moments, when only the slightest veneer of filmy, translucent sound is audible, it is easy to convince yourself the songs don't even exist. A figment of the imagination. Fragments of a slumberous vision. Remnants from a time long-forgotten but retained with a warped sense of déjà vu. "I like to think of my music as conjuring a strong sense of place," says Greinke. "My process, whether in the studio or performing live, involves meticulous layering, combining sounds and placing them in a three-dimensional space.... Eventually a landscape develops, evoking different moods and places. "I tend to be influenced by the sounds I hear around me. My earlier albums, like Cities in Fog, were made after moving to Seattle and spending time listening, often from a distance, to the industrial sites near my neighborhood. Then I began spending time in the mountains and desert of eastern Washington, and found more of those kinds of sonic environments working [their] way into my music. Later I went to Southeast Asia and exposed myself to a great array of exotic new sounds. These shifts seem to come about as an organic, natural response to where I am at any given time of my life." Unlike the obvious cultural plunderings of most electro-tribal crossover acts (Deep Forest et al.), Greinke assimilates these environments through a form of subliminal osmosis--hidden sounds seep their way into the brain, where they're subconsciously molded into new forms and recontextualized as music. For much of Greinke's career, that music was so subtly abstract in its manipulation of electronic and natural noises that grasping it directly was impossible. It slithered into the corner of your head, only to be captured in mental side glances. Recently, however, he's been emerging from the shadows. On his latest CD, Swimming (Prudence/BSC), he peeks into brighter, more accessible areas, where rhythms take the lead rather than purposely sinking into the terrain. While the album lacks the rigid structures and hook-filled coherency of mainstream ethnic techno, it's as close to pop as he's come. Greinke explains the transformation as a result of his travels to Southeast Asia, where a fascination with rhythm eventually found a foothold in his songs: "I spent three months in Indonesia (Sumatra, Java, Bali, Lombok) and three months between Malaysia, Thailand and Laos. I moved around quite a bit and experienced a wide range of environments--huge crowded cities to very rural places, tiny villages and nature reserves.... When I returned and began making music again, I completed an album I had begun before traveling, called Changing Skies. Once finished, it became readily apparent that my experiences there had found a way into the music, particularly in terms of mood, atmosphere and sonic space." The aptness of the Changing Skies title is twofold: It delineates a break from Greinke's earlier industrial/ambient work, and it evokes imagery of ever-evolving weather patterns, towering cumulonimbus thunderheads dissolving into wispy cirrus streaks. It's also no coincidence that many of Greinke's album names (like Night and Fog, Moving Climates and Big Weather) seem to be inspired more by barometric changes than cultural ones--his collegiate studies focused on meteorology. Don't make too big a deal of it, though, he warns. "My interest in the weather is more experiential than academic," says Greinke. "I like to watch it, be in it, feel it, see it change and move across the landscape. I like the different moods that come with various meteorological phenomena, particularly those which occur just prior to more intense events like tornadoes, thunderstorms, hurricanes, et cetera. I hear and think about my music in a similar way, but it's mostly in retrospect that I see the correlation." Still, there's no denying the rush of air that seems to course through his albums, the palpable sense that the atmosphere has altered itself, become something...else. Press play. The whispers in your ear begin again. You try to apply a rational meaning to it all, but you can't. After a while, you don't want to. The music writhes inside your skull, down the unused pathways of the brain. The dream takes over. Let it happen.
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