On: Something That Has Form and Something That Does Not

French composer Sylvian Chauveau and Pan-American mastermind Steven Hess are an expert team at siphoning songs out of pure static. Only instead of hiring a producer to simply man the boards for their joint project On, they employ a fellow visionary of sonic exploration to take what they have already done and make it completely their own. And where On had recruited the stylings of dark ambient great Deathprod for last year’s Your Naked Ghost Comes Back at Night, they’ve summoned longtime band friend Christian Fennesz to oversee the reconfiguration of Something That Has Form and Something That Does Not. However, where Deathprod eked out the swirling terror within the quiet calm of On’s atmospheric oeuvre, Fennesz focuses more on the rhythms between the space on the muted rhythms within Hess’s patterned drumming and Chauveau’s prepared guitar pulses, allowing the music of this pair to move like never before.