Rupert Lally
by Mat Smith
The 20x20 project is the brainchild of Norfolk electronic artist Neil Stringfellow, who issues his own music under the name Audio Obscura. The project is one of extreme discipline: twenty artists issuing a suite of twenty tracks lasting twenty seconds, each one accompanied by a continuing sleeve design by David Barrington, with a new release in the series arriving – you guessed it – every twenty days. Releases thus far have come from Daniel Diaz, Minimal_Drone*GRL and Guy Birkin, and the latest comes from Swiss-based Rupert Lally.
The challenge with this project is to somehow create pieces with feeling and depth across an incredibly short duration. Lally is no stranger to this – whether through his foundation in music for theatre or his hypothetical accompaniments to books like J. G. Ballard’s High Rise, John Wyndham’s Day Of The Triffids and Frank Herbert’s Dune, Lally approaches music through the lens of unfolding drama, his music often feeling like the short cues from a soundtrack. So his work on Icosa, wherein each track is numbered according to Greek prefixes, manages to carry a purpose and momentum in spite of the brevity of time available to him.
Others might have been tempted to offer up some sort of directionless modular noodling but in Lally’s hands we have tracks like the wonky rhythmic gestures of ‘Penta’ or ‘Ennea’, both pieces sounding not unlike an errant early drum machine coerced into play awkward patterns. There’s also the mysterious ‘Octa’ and ‘Octakaideca’, which nod back gently in the direction of Lally’s Dune score, and the soothing tones of ‘Di’, which sounds like some of Eno’s most languid DX7 creations. Elsewhere, the pretty ‘Triskaideca’ has a shimmering, crystalline quality full of spiky notes and delicate textures, while ‘Heptakaideca’ has a naturalistic aspect to its playing that sounds like processed guitar.
Do the math and you’ll realise that each 20x20 release lasts just under seven minutes. For many electronic musicians, their pieces are often just getting started by that point, and Lally himself has plenty of tracks that build up slowly over much, much longer timeframes. To economically deliver twenty complete vignettes, each one containing – variously – emotion, subtlety, complexity and intricate detail, without once sounding like offcuts or sketches, is a credit to Lally’s idiosyncratic and highly-focussed approach to music.
