Review – i8ub (bake) 2001 – by Phillip Sherburne, Needledrops

++ I8U, B (Bake/Staalplaat): Like Goem or early Panasonic, i8u‘s music sculpts carefully shuddering rhythms out of the clash of waveforms and undulating bass tones. It’s not quite repetition’s endgame, but it comes close; as with Noto or Thomas Brinkmann, you have to listen close to hear the variations as overlapping loops twine out to seeming infinity. For all its simplicity, B charts strikingly original territory; each track impresses its signal firmly in your perception, elevating the mathematics of sound to a more abstracted poetry. Music like this, ideally, is meant to be heard in an enormous space on military-grade speakers, so that the room becomes its own instrument. But this CD still suggests a vast, cavernous expanse of sound.