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James Ginzburg

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emptyset, “ash” (Subtext, 2023)

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It has been a while since this duo of James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas last surfaced, but they are back with a new EP to celebrate Subtext’s 50th release. Since releasing 2019’s Blossoms, the pair have been quite busy with other projects, as Purgas’s research played a crucial role in the release of The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969​-​1972 while Ginzburg has kept himself occupied with running a record label, releasing solo albums, and performing as part of “experimental supergroup” Osmium. 

Emptyset was never fully dormant, however, and Ginzburg and Purgas convened in Bristol this summer to shape their accumulated ideas into one of their most focused and singular releases in recent memory. It is also one of their most concise, as ash clocks in at an extremely lean 16-minutes. If this were any other project, that brevity would suggest a serious dearth of fresh ideas or compelling new material, but it is exactly the right length for a perfect distillation of emptyset’s viscerally spasmodic and pummeling percussion assaults.

Much like their Manchester peers Autechre, it is very easy to forget that James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas were ever interested in making beat-driven music aimed for the dancefloor, as they long ago plunged into an avant-garde rabbit hole of abstract deconstructionism, cutting edge sound design, and self-built instruments and have not looked back since. 

I bring up that origin for a reason, as understanding that ash was inspired by Bristol’s sound system culture is crucial to grasping the appeal of the duo’s current vision. In fact, I was initially underwhelmed by these songs, as I could not understand why Ginzburg in particular would want to regress to punishing, no-frills rhythm workouts after blowing me away with the droning immensity of his 2021 solo album crystallise, a frozen eye.

Eventually, however, I got around to listening to ash on headphones and everything immediately made sense again: this is not an EP intended for casual listening. The correct way to experience ash is to crank it up so loud that you can feel every seismic crunch, vibration, and throb. Once I had that revelation, ash immediately transformed into something considerably more brilliant and unique. 

This is absolutely not the place to look for great songcraft or killer beats, but it is probably one of the best releases around for those looking for precision-engineered brutality, masterfully harnessed spatialized sound, and intense physicality. Someone should commission a forward-thinking ballet company to choreograph a mind-blowing performance for one of these songs immediately.

Musically, ash-era emptyset shares a healthy amount of common ground with classic Godflesh, as the main ingredients are overloaded bass and a fondness for bludgeoning, mechanized repetition, but it would be closer to the mark to suggest that their primary influences are “convulsions” and “the futuristic battle scenes from the Terminator movies.” 

Some pieces certainly evoke robot tanks rolling over piles of crunching bones in a scorched and broken landscape more strongly than others (“embers” being the best example), but the differences between these six songs are less important than their common ground of shuddering waves of distorted bass, lurching rhythms, and slow-motion machine gun snares. Experiencing this album is a lot like getting thwacked in the head with six different baseball bats: they would certainly all have their own unique character, but the subtle differences between them would be unavoidably eclipsed by the force of the impact.

To my ears, the best moments are probably “cinder” (I half expected viscous trails of blood to start running down my walls when the opening fog of grinding and menacing dissonance appeared) or the title piece (“a giant sentient typewriter with malicious intent” meets “the space-time continuum warps, stretches, and tears during a fireworks display”), but every one of these pieces is an absolute banger. 

That is an impressive achievement in itself, obviously, but a full album of such uninterrupted bludgeoning would be absolutely exhausting and would quickly yield diminishing returns. To their everlasting credit, however, Purgas and Ginzburg understood the limitations of their vision and were wise enough to keep most of ash‘s violent, churning convulsions under three minutes: if there was ever an album that has earned the coveted “all killer, no filler” mantle, it is this one. Every single song makes a deep impact and the whole thing is over long before any numbness starts to set in.

In a 2017 interview, Ginzburg noted that he and Purgas leave “piles and heaps of detritus on the cutting room floor” and now I understand why: ash is the sort of perfect distillation that could have only been made by absolutely ruthless editors willing to throw away months of work and several albums worth of material to just to wind up with one great 16-minute EP.

Listen here.

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James Ginzburg, “crystallise, a frozen eye” (Subtext, 2021)

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This latest solo album from emptyset’s James Ginzburg completely blindsided me, as it feels like his two of his longtime fascinations have finally converged into one gloriously crushing and intense tour de force. In characteristically cerebral fashion, Ginzburg conceived of crystallise, a frozen eye as an acoustic counterpoint to emptyset’s artificial intelligence-driven Blossoms, but what he ultimately arrived at feels considerably less conceptual than most Subtext albums. Or maybe the concept just feels completely eclipsed by the churning intensity of the music. 

In any case, this album feels like the most natural direction in the world now that it exists, as Ginzburg essentially just combined emptyset’s viscerally seismic approach to sound design with his deep interest in more traditional and earthy sounds (his previous solo album wove together strains of Gaelic folk music, Iranian traditional music, and Indian classical music). 

Yet another “obvious in hindsight” move was Ginzburg’s leftfield decision to enlist devoted bass enthusiast/past collaborator Joker for the mastering role, ensuring that all of the songs pack some seriously house-shaking low-end heft. All of those seemingly disparate threads combine seamlessly to yield a work of almost elemental force that feels like the culminating achievement of Ginzburg’s career. This has to be one of the heaviest and most unconventional drone albums of all time.

The album opens with something resembling the chiming of an old grandfather clock, which presumably indicates that it is now time to be enveloped in a churning and heaving sea of massive, buzzing strings. In that regard, “light evaporates” is a resounding triumph as a statement of intent, as it feels like miles of viscerally rattling, thick metal cables tuned to the resonant frequency of the earth are being shaken by a strong wind. That immense, buzzing behemoth is reasonably representative of the album, but Ginzburg is impressively inventive at achieving a similar effect in varied and divergent ways. 

For example, “on obsidian expanse” sounds like Glenn Branca’s “Guitar Trio” if it had been written for an ensemble of cloned Ellen Fullmans (lots of buzzing, rattling strings, and droning unison notes). Unexpectedly, it ultimately transforms into an outro that feels like a psychedelic ancient palace ritual, but most other pieces undergo minimal transformation, as there is no real reason to evolve further when a piece is an absolute monster right from the first notes. 

In fact, all eleven songs are legitimately awe-inspiring to some degree and some feel downright revelatory. The most adventurous one is probably “the eyes behind,” which sounds like an orchestra trying to tune crystal instruments while broken glass rains down in slow motion and someone strangles a saxophone. However, the vaguely New Age-y “a gate left open disappeared” is an especially strange trip as well, as it sounds like an ’80s synth guy trying to simultaneously evoke a giant celestial harp and compose a sequel to Music for Eighteen Musicians. 

That said, my favorite pieces mostly come near the end of the album and there are quite a few of them: “border, dispersing” (an ancient war procession crossing a mountain pass), “twilight in pierced velvet” (three killer noise guitar bands churning up a roiling cacophony), and “outside, infinite” (Branca reimagined as Eastern-inspired desert psychedelia). Only the latter dips its toes in any attempt at melody, but that is basically just gilding the lily when nearly every damn song is an immense, heaving and oft-rapturous celebration of visceral textures and harmonically rich seismic thrum.

Samples can be found here.

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emptyset, “Blossoms” (Thrill Jockey, 2019)

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No one can predict which trends or innovations will shape or define the experimental music of the future, but emptyset’s latest bombshell certainly feels like a gloriously bracing vision of one possible path: Blossoms is an album “generated entirely from the output of a neural network-based artificial intelligence system.” While the duo of James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas has always been extremely forward-thinking and experimentally minded, this is the first emptyset album where it seems like the pair has actually leapt several years ahead of everyone else rather than merely taking existing ideas to unexpected (and sometimes fascinating) extremes. 

That said, Blossoms is also a culmination of the same themes that have obsessed emptyset for years, as the source material comes from recent acoustic improvisations with materials like wood and metal as well as their backlog of more architecturally inspired recordings (though it all ultimately emerges in radically unrecognizable form). At its best, Blossoms sounds like little else that I have ever heard, evoking a kind of visceral, shape-shifting sci-fi nightmare.

Imagine, if you will, a world in which the Transformers are not a ham-fisted and painfully stupid big-budget movie franchise but are instead both very real and very terrifying. And that, rather than morphing into childish nonsense like boomboxes or trucks, they instead transform into amorphous and phantasmagoric Lovecraftian horrors made from liquid mercury. On pieces like the grinding and churning “Bloom,” Blossoms evokes exactly what I would expect such a half-organic/half-mechanized abomination to sound like. Then it goes one step further and seems to also warp and stretch both time and the fabric of reality. 

Needless to say, that is quite an impressive feat indeed, though it is not one that the artificial intelligence system can claim full credit for: the way the sounds unfold and interact is indeed gloriously radical and inhuman, but the seismic, world-shaking power is entirely due to the sound design wizardry of Ginzburg and Purgas. The importance of the latter cannot be understated, as composing an album in such a fashion has some significant limitations (much like those of chromatic, atonal, or noise music). 

Blossoms is an album that demands to be played loudly, as the sheer shuddering, explosive power makes the lack of conventional melodies, harmonies, or compositional arcs feel largely irrelevant. There are occasionally some moments where this album achieves a kind of alien beauty as well, but the more pervasive achievement is that it resembles some kind of massive metal organism in a constant state of awe-inspiring structural transformation.

That said, emptyset’s AI is far from a one-trick pony—it just happens to be exceptionally gifted at executing dazzling textural and dynamic feats, so those are the ones that initially stand out the most. In the opening “Petal,” for example, the grinding and squirming cybernetic onslaught provides a framework for a fluttering melodic fragment at the piece’s heart. The weirdly lovely “Pollen” returns to that same theme with even greater success, as its lilting and wilting snatch of melody feels simultaneously tender and encased in a prickly exoskeleton. 

The other highlights head in significantly divergent paths though. For example, “Blade” feels like a warm and quietly lovely drone piece adrift on heavy swells of buzzing metallic shimmer, while “Axil” eschews any warmth at all to converge into a lurching and shuffling groove that unpredictably collapses and reforms as it moves relentlessly forward. My favorite piece, however, is probably “Stem,” which slowly takes shape from deep subterranean throbs, then unexpectedly erupts into something that resembles a hallucinatory and time-stretched dance party for immense, wounded machines.

The closing “Clone” is a noteworthy piece as well, simultaneously illustrating both Blossoms‘ violent, unpredictable appeal and the one weakness that keeps emptyset from quite becoming one of my favorite projects. The piece begins as a pulsing organ-like chord that gets ingeniously stretched, distended, and deconstructed for a brief and wonderful passage, yet everything is quickly consumed by a massive cosmic buzz saw that grinds and obliterates all other sound. It has such a promising start, but it is summarily destroyed rather than being allowed to evolve into something more. 

That has always been the rub for emptyset: great ideas are regularly executed with brutal force and clarity, but their aesthetic begins and ends there. There are generally not “songs” or satisfying compositional arcs on emptyset albums, just cool experimental vamps that appear and simply run their course for a few minutes before making way for the next piece. Admittedly, much of that is due to conceptual- or gear-related constraints, but that does not make it any less of a real and valid issue.

Fortunately, Purgas and Ginzburg have found an ingenious way to transcend that shortcoming on Blossoms: just ratchet up the wonder and the elemental power until everything else is eclipsed. It feels weird to describe a solution that involved eighteen months of work with “an international network of programmers working at the cutting edge of sound synthesis” as a blunt solution to a complex problem, but the intricacy of the process ultimately resulted in a legitimately volcanic outcome. And a legitimately effective one. Blossoms is unquestionably a significant and bold leap forward in sound art, but it is equally remarkable in how it transforms the meticulous and the cerebral into something downright apocalyptic.

Samples can be found here.