It would be difficult to find a sound artist in Australia who’s reputation preceded him quite as formidably as Paul Gough’s. With a discography as Pimmon stretching back to the '90s on labels as wide-reaching as FatCat, Tigerbeat6, Staalplaat and Fällt, including an unbelievable collaboration with Oren Ambarchi, Fennesz, Peter Rehberg and Keith Rowe, many of his Australian contemporaries are left looking a little naked. However, aside from a 3 inch, Curse You, Evil Clown on Perth label Meupe, and appearances at Lawrence English’s Liquid Architecture festival of sound arts, Pimmon has been close enough to being off the radar for six years. A new album, Smudge Another Yesterday, has finally reached the public on the superb Sydney label Preservation (responsible for Saddleback, Richard Skelton, various Tom Carter collaborations, et cetera).

Pimmon’s CV aside, I approached this album with a great deal of purity, as I imagine is only natural after such a period of silence. I bought my copy of the album at an incredible, surreal show with the touring Grouper supported by Seaworthy and Pimmon, and immediately put it on at whatever stupid hour it was when I arrived home. For the time, this strange, noisy, huge and beautiful album was the perfect soundtrack to the drowsy, confused awe that followed the gig. Every sound is unexpected and remarkably realized, covering everywhere from oddball electronics to heavily distorted drone tracks and to cluttering beat-centered ambience. Under the surface are barely perceptible materials from huge choirs to organs, fragmented instruments or even more incidental aural products of domestic life. The whole barrage is managed with a musical sensitivity that might have seemed impossible for such envelopingly dense material.

This is the kind of album that grabs you by your haunches and spits you out an hour later without apologies for the sheer intensity of the material within. At this point, all of those programs, the granular synthesis, dozens of forms of distortion, delays, EQs, reverbs, et cetera, are all themselves as much human tools for the moulding of emotional response as anything more apparently natural. That said, it appears (on this album, at least) that most of the samples that Pimmon draws from are staunchly organic, but even through all of the manipulations they are afforded; they earn their identity despite, or because of, their context. A loop of a horn playing in a fairly regular room takes on a jilted, damaged form of beauty when passed through the hands of Gough. The masses of organ sound that permeate much of the album could only reach that kind of sound as fashioned by Gough, forming character with which to spar with others through the mix. Gough less pokes at the ceiling of a sonic critical mass than operates from a level slightly above it; yet the melody, the “song” in Pimmon, as Preservation label head Andrew Khedoori offers, is not contextualized by the noise, but rather is intrinsically planted in it.

“Hidden”, for example, centers around fractions of tones that are peaking like crazy, barely managing to find their identity through its distortion. Meanwhile, a subconscious ambience builds and recedes over the course of the eight minute track, with the usual psycho-stereo perception that has afforded most of the musical material on Smudge Another Yesterday its wrapping paper. But again, we go back to this concept of “song” or “melody” that implants itself because of, or rather despite what may appear to be abrasive materials. The most devastating, arresting element of the piece is not the peripheral ambience, but the heavily peaking organ sounds at the centre of it. There is something deeply affecting about listening to those sounds struggle and fight each other for air, drowning in the sheer breadth of each other. That the track ends simply with a cut-off, the battle never reaching a resolution, is perfect for the preceding eight minutes of beautiful chaos that appears to be barely within the reach of every other musical element. This is one of the rare moments where time truly passes by musical material and not by the measure of minutes and seconds. The pulses could go on endlessly.

I could try unfolding this album as far as it reaches, but finding the very core of it would be a task fit for a greater reviewer and musician. The layers seem to go deeper than can be heard, but are all simultaneously vital to the massive sound that Paul Gough builds up throughout the album. Together, Smudge Another Yesterday is a wild, seething, euphoric mass barely contained by the natural limitations of electronic signal. By the end of the album, particularly after the unapologetically epic “Some Days Are Tones”, I’m exhausted in the best way possible. This album is absolutely essential.

-Marcus Whale