Some records are effortlessly made and extremely hard to enjoy (take harsh noise releases for instance). “effacement” must have been the exact opposite – a highly fascinating listen and very likely mind-wrecking to produce. After all, the guts, the stemina, the dedication, the trust in oneself and one’s music and the courgae to produce an album as radical and idiosyncratic as this, usually don’t come easy.
For there is hardly an artists out there who does not, at least for the glimpse of an eye, think of his or her listener’s expectations. And “effacement” does quite a bit to confuse them. Think of the sound of a ping pong ball grinding to a halt again and again. Then add to that the crackling and snapping of a fireplace, of a bycicle wheel turning on its axis and of a vacuum cleaner imitating a fire alarm. Then suppose all of this were starting from a point of almost complete silence and growing in intensity for almost twenty minutes, until the delicate sounds have turned into a frenzied generator, rotating like a washing machine in free fall. That is about what you can expect of the first track, “Thermo”, and it doesn’t even come close to tapping the full potential of the album. Microscopic particles, hissing and high-pitched tones are the red thread of a work, which is homogenous enough to create a world of its own and offers enough surprises to keep the listener awake at all times. Context and volume are important parameters – speach and hints at harmonic development are often hidden behind shwashes of sound and on several occasions Korber deliberately plays trick on his audience’s mind – such as in “Wüste” (meaning: Desert), wher some white noise transforms from a flowing river into a train, then into rain and back again. “Fred Austere” toys with bells and chimes, moving in a tranquil rhythmic pattern, like a peaceful clock work. And after almost an hour of concentrated manipulations, there is a sudden moment of atmospherics, as a deep bass line takes over.
There are long and plentiful passages, in which a single source is left to linger and fully expand and it is these moments which make “effacement” so special. One could well imagine other artists shrinking away from them, but Korber pushes through and shares something intense with the listener. Two years in the making and recorded in three different locations, this may not have come easy. But if this was indeed the case, it has never translated into the music.
>Tobias Fischer, Tokafi, 7.2006

Progress is an important theme in Tomas Korber's music. Each track on Effacement, released on Jason Kahn's label Cut, heads off with silence in which the sound slowy grows and reaches the treshold of hearability. The best example of this offers the first track, which starts with minimal crackling. As the track progresses the crackling starts to remind of (and change into) glass marbles that hit each other rhythmically and very fast. The minimal fluctuations give the music an hyperactive and very interesting touch. The next track reminds of running water which can hardly be detected in the beginning. Till the sounds grows and turns into a loud hiss. Each track has a completely own identity, the third track seems to be featuring gongs and the fourth track by this Swiss/Spanish composer offers a long sine-wave which gets slowly louder till a metallic tune has been reached. A wonderful release in which the detail counts.
>Phosphor, 7.2006

It is usually a contradiction when adjectives such as microscopic and massive both serve equally in describing a musician’s sound. Typically, it would be a journalistic farce—a writer attempting to grasp opposites and merely confusing the reader. And you may think I’m doing just that, but that would be a disservice to your ears, as well as Effacement’s astounding display of dynamics, subtleties, form, and technique.
Tomas Korber is a young Swiss/Spanish musician who has performed and played with many of the avant-garde’s mainstays—including Keith Rowe, Günter Müller, and Otomo Yoshihide. While appearing on innumerable collaborative albums and projects over the past few years, Effacement acts as a rare glimpse solely into Korber’s mind in which he illuminates a bright and wonderful collection of sounds. Split into six different compositions, Effacement begins with the momentous “Thermo.” A nineteen minute piece that slowly and intricately places glitches and minute digital scars atop one another, its power is hidden in the fact that you don’t realize your speakers are sputtering and spitting out a tornado of twisted sonic debris until you’re swallowed up in it. It is a sound both beautiful and terrifying—one that approximates a swarm of locusts or an amplified surge of electricity. Microscopic and massive.
“Wüste,” the following track, surrenders to silence for the majority of its duration, properly displaying a prominent feature throughout Effacement. The silence permeates a vast majority of the album and allows the gradual increase of feedback and burst of radio static on the “The Synaptic Spell” to retain a heightened importance. Yet, the most striking feature of Effacement is how fluid Korber’s transitions are between sound sources, approaches, and techniques. Gritty lo-fi noise of the aforementioned track cleanly follows “Fred Austere”’s gamelan-like guitar overtones, and the digital miasma of “Thermo” collides with a stunning, overwhelming silence.
Effacement, though, never feels disjointed or inconsistent. On the contrary, it sounds even better when heard in the uniform context of the entire album. The extreme dynamics of Effacement play to its advantage as the album’s experimental nature keeps the sound at once unpredictable and varied, but also unified and cohesive. This is a testament to Korber’s astute ear to take a variant of sounds and sources and craft an album as challenging, beautiful, and awe-inspiring as this.
> Ryan Potts, Stylus Magazine, 2.2006

The young Swiss guitarist Tomas Korber is rapidly becoming one of my favorite musicians operating in the area roughly known as electroacoustic improvisation. To call him simply a guitarist is, however, a bit misleading since Korber approaches the instrument in ways similar to Keith Rowe (with whom he has also collaborated). Korber uses the guitar as a pure sound source, manipulating the instrument and its properties as well as supplementing it with electronics, and he has steadily developed his own voice in this area. Indeed, the arc of growth from momentan_def (with Günter Müller and Steinbrüchel) to the solo Mass Production to the excellent collaboration Brackwater (with eriKm, Müller, and Toshimaru Nakamura) is undeniable. But with Effacement, Korber has produced his most powerful statement to date and one of the best records of 2005.
A long time in the making, this recording represents not only a significant compositional statement (its six parts exceed an hour in duration, though they can easily be digested singly) but also a kind of breakthrough in Korber’s technique. A tabletop guitarist of real skill, Korber has here successfully integrated his experiments with computer and electronics (and even some field recordings). The opening, very appropriately titled “Thermo” comprises nearly a third of the disc, and it gives the listener a sense of Korber’s powerful control of dynamics, intensity, pacing, and imagination. It builds slowly (as is Korber’s wont), like a contact-miked piece of metal heating up.
But what’s refreshing about the sequence of pieces as a whole is that, even though they form a coherent entity, Korber displays a wide range of techniques. “Wuste”, for example, sounds like the tides but in the immediately subsequent “Fred Austere” Korber incorporates some of his most explicitly guitaristic gestures (light percussive noises on the strings and so forth). The chorus of ringing bells reminds me of some of the work of Repeat (where Cut label boss Jason Kahn explores similar strategies with percussion). “The Synaptic Spell” is a long, hypnotic, mechanical grind that explodes suddenly in places. And a wonderfully clanging, resounding drone concludes the disc with “Que les Jours s’en Aillent”.
Unlike a lot of music I listen to in this general area, Korber’s pieces here confront not so much with visual images of the music itself (though that’s inevitable) but with a sense of my own position (usually spatial) relative to it. That is, I often get the feeling when listening to Effacement—and it’s been getting continual rotation—that I am walking in some sparse landscape, approaching some mute monolith of sonic properties. When Korber manipulates volume and density, when he sharpens his attacks or cools the sound out, when he bores down or eases up, I frequently get the very vivid sense that I am studying a vast, roughly hewn shape with a myriad of fascinating details written on its surface.
If the overriding concern here is with methodology and tactics, which eschew conventional forms of exuberance or expression, I’m not convinced that the music is effaced or effaces itself. Indeed, I’m left at the end of this recording with an exhausted, exhilarated sense of Korber’s unique and important musical personality. This is just fabulous music, one of the year’s very best recordings.
>Jason Bivins, One Final Note, 1.2006

Tomas Korber is a Swiss-Spanish composer from Zurich who has an impressive list of past collaborations. At just 26 he has worked with the likes of Otomo Yoshide, Keith Rowe, and Toshimaru Nakamara. Those familiar with the work of these artists will know what sound territory we are in immediately. Korber works with a very simple setup: guitar, mixing board and effects pedals. What he produces though is anything but simple. His compositions are very much in the lowercase/microsound realm. Taken as a whole, ‘Effacement’ is a journey through crackles, bass tones and almost silence. The only recognizable guitar sound is on ‘Fred Austere’, the middle piece of six (the entire record is just over 1 hour), and briefly in the fourth piece, ‘Too Thin A Skin’. For the rest of the record Korber treats the listener to gradual layering and sound elements far removed from their guitar-based source. In many of the pieces, there is a wonderful build-up to a crescendo of volume and an immediate, sudden return to silence. The strength of ‘Effacement’ is Korber’s attention to detail and the morphing quality of his compositions. Not one for the faint hearted but great all the same.
>Simon Hampson, Cyclic Defrost, 1.2006

Tomas Korber is generally referred to as a guitarist, but his work goes a long way beyond riffs and modes. While he does perform and compose with the instrument, he prefers the anti-guitar approach favored by such notable peers as Taku Sugimoto and Hans Tammen -- he uses software and other manipulations to remove all hint of "obvious" six-string action from his material.
In opener "Thermo", Korber begins with arguably the most minimal of motifs, a miniscule digital glitch. He adds a twin and then a triplet, but does it so lethargically that you might not notice that the CD is playing; he pits the elements against one another in a canonic fashion, while uniting the pinpoints and scratches into a thick, flowing rhythmic texture. Korber is stingy and patient with his materials, holding us in a trance with nervous tension -- like the anticipation of that last page in a book, where we finally learn the killer's motive -- and amazement at how much mileage he gets with such a limited sound set. He concedes near the six-minute mark, introducing a breathy, pulsing drone -- which sounds a bit like a marching band heard from a few miles away -- beneath the increasingly twitchy speckled swarm. Korber knows when you've had enough of this sameness, and abruptly hacks away the excess detail, riding a lilting vapor trail until niente for the last four of the piece's nineteen minutes.
Following such a spectacular work is difficult, but the composer does his best in "Wüste". What initially seems like a lull, at least compared to the previous sonorous labyrinth, soon turns into a hushed concentration of electrical hum; you may have to turn off your heat to hear it, as this collage of guitar feedback and low frequencies is set right on the threshold of human hearing (though you feel it in your stomach). In "Fred Austere", Korber exploits the electric guitarisms hinted at during the prior work. He leaves his cable halfway into the jack, messing with it for short intervals, then nervously tapping his buried-under-a-sea-of-electronics strings for a Gamelan-like effect (i.e. deep, monotonal metallic thumps).
The remaining three tracks follow suit: Korber circumvents and varies his palette, but constructs the works in the same formal fashion. He methodically molds a simple sine wave from meek to painful on "The Synaptic Spell", adding then peeling back harmonics and screeching AM radio static over the course of fourteen minutes. He explores a bit of melody via lugubrious post-rock guitar drones, Godspeed style, in "Too Thin a Skin". He summarizes the previous hour during the album's final few moments ("Que les jours s'en aillent") by mixing earlier clicks and beeps into a hospital-monitor rhythm, killing the body, exposing the beating heart for all to hear. Then there's a minute of silence -- which might sound a bit dramatic, but you haven't listened yet, have you?
In 1901, after witnessing a single performance of a Debussy piece (Pelleas et Melisand), one critic called the composer's music "vague, floating, without color and without shape, without movement and without life." However, Debussy's music is historically revered for its layers, simplistic sound forged from complex techniques and, as one author describes, a global approach of "quiet intensity". In other words, this work took a minute to label but years to understand. In the same manner, Korber's music might initially seem like a bunch of noisy, messed up CD skips and test tones, but an investment of sober concentration reveals bottomless textures, deft precision, OCD attention to microscopic detail and the composer's ability to animate the digital world. Stellar.
>Dave Madden, Splendid Magazine, 12.2005

Œuvre pointilliste et minimale à la fois, foisonnante bien que rigoureusement géométrique, Effacement met en scène six compositions fondées sur un même schéma de crescendo, six blocs dynamiques de matière granulaire en prise avec le silence, six mouvements qui conquièrent d’abord leur espace, avant de disparaître. Tomas Korber a recours à une diversité de techniques que le son n’exhibe pas, loin s’en faut : guitare, ordinateur, field recordings et électronique.
Tout disparaît en quelque sorte sous le projet du musicien, que ce soit le réel enregistré ou les instruments auxquels il a recours. D’une abstraction d’abord extrême (Thermo, Wüste), Effacement semble progressivement s’ouvrir à mesure que se déploient dans le temps chacune de ses corolles : Fred Austere met ainsi à contribution des percussions métalliques, systèmes déséquilibrés d’arythmies séduisantes, une danse minimale pour micro-percussions. Le minimalisme sait se faire entêtant, sa qualité fantomatique est mise à contribution de belle manière dans ce morceau qui navigue entre ethnicité désincarnée (les percussions), fantasme ultra-technologique au rebut, et élans contenus, dynamiques avortées, cinégénie interrompue. Granulation et saturation : Tomas Korber n’a pas attendu d’être vieux (26 ans) pour intégrer ses modèles, Keith Rowe, Jason Kahn, Günter Müller ou Steinbrüchel, autant de guitaristes ou d’électroniciens à la frontière des architectures granulaires les plus rigoureuses et de l’improvisation, qui donnent à ce projet une sorte de caution de qualité, un héritage à l’intérieur duquel il prend sa place doucement, sans bouleverser la donne – on ne la bouleverse pas si facilement et ce type d’expérimentations électroniques est une musique du temps long, sans bouleversement violent fréquent.
Crépitements et grésillements, bruissements et télescopages microscopiques, essors brutaux ou longues envolées s’échangent par cycle à l’intérieur de ces six pièces que Korber a conçu comme une seule et même composition à six volets, variations sur un même schéma, autant d’essais pour approcher et capturer le moment exact où le son émerge et disparaît. Art du ressassement, du piétinement sonore, du retour sur soi et des tentatives six fois réitérées, la musique de Tomas Korber est habitée par le manque, gagnée par une déficience du son qu’elle cherche à résoudre. Toujours en défaut, son caractère à la fois ouvert et clos, dynamique et monomaniaque l’éloigne de la rigueur confiante des œuvres géométriques dont elle s’inspire : derrière les processus, l’abstraction et l’électronique drastique perce quelque chose comme la conscience d’un échec et la nécessité de réitérer toujours les mêmes gestes, les mêmes tentatives. L’arbitraire de l’abstraction est alors gagné par une nécessité de musicien, la froideur des systèmes fond peu à peu sous la vie invisible qui parcourt la musique et qui vient dessiner les grandes lignes, encore à confirmer, d’une vision du monde.
>Johnny One Shot, Infratunes, 1.2006

Das ist noch Musik , die man riechen kann. Die Digibags aus schwerem Karton mit ihrem minimalistischen Seriendesign sind vollgesaugt mit ölig prallem Siebdruckodeur. In silberne Strohsterne auf nachtblauem Grund eingeklappt sind sechs Mikrophonien von TOMAS KORBER. Der 1979 in Zürich geborene Elektroakustiker hat im Lauf der letzten zwei Jahre mit abstrahierten Gitarrenklängen, Electronics, Feldaufnahmen und Computer eine Reihe von Stücken erstellt, die nun, zu effacement (cut 015) zusammengefasst, sich wie eine zusammenhängende Suite darbieten. ‚Thermo‘ ist ein gut viertelstündiges pulsminimalistisch flatterndes Gezirpe, das nach einem aufrauschenden Höhepunkt noch drei Minuten lang in Beinahestille aushaucht. Aus der Stille taucht dann allmählich ‚Wüste‘ auf, ein feines Zischen, wie rieselnder Sand oder Wind, der mit launisch-leisem Fauchen Dünen kämmt und bis zur letzten Sekunde nicht nachlässt. Völlig nahtlos schließt sich dem ein Soundscape an, den Korber mit dem schönen Wortspiel ‚Fred Austere‘ charakterisiert als etwas Tänzerisches und doch auch Karges, Asketisches. Auf ein sirrendes Grundrauschen ist dunkles Gitarrengedonge aufgetupft, wie ein nervöser Kobold, der über eine Tableguitar drippelt. Körbers Ästhetik, die im Zusammenwirken mit ästhetischen Verwandten wie etwa Günter Müller, Steinbrüchel, ErikM oder Dieb 13 nicht immer eindeutig zu identifizieren war, entfaltet sich hier in all ihrer ambienten Hintergründigkeit, aber immer wieder mit impulsiven Spitzen und dynamischem Andrang. Der Übergang zu ‚The Synaptic Spell‘ ist erneut unmerklich, die Tönung wird heller, ein unscharfes Kurzwellen-Lo-Fi sirrt minutenlang unscharf vor sich hin und bricht plötzlich um in ein diskant gespicktes Wummern. Nicht gerade ideal für Tinnitusvorgeschädigte oder Leute mit ‚Too Thin a Skin‘. Dafür bekrabbelt Korber erneut die Gitarre und belagert dann die Trommelfelle mit rauem Feedback. Vinylgeknister markiert schließlich den Anfang vom Ende, ‚Que les jours s‘en aillent‘, ein eisiges, kristallines Schimmern, immer spitzer zugeschliffen, so dass sich die von paranormalen Geräuschen durchsetzte Raumzeit per Nadel injezieren lässt.
>Rigobert Dittmann, Bad Alchemy, 1.2006

Effacement is quite a divergence, and I think an improvement, on the work I’ve heard from Korber. Like so many Swiss and Viennese before him, Korber is most easily lumped in the microsound category: digital music rife with microscopically-distanced sound fragments and closed silences, though less pulverized towards a glitchist all-over-ness than instead dissected and laboriously sutured into a celebration of nuance, the notes of the noise rather than the noise between the notes.
Past Korber releases, like his last Cut title, Momentan Def. or the Mass Production CD-R from last year, tend toward denser soundfields: up-front feedbacking, clustered guitar wranglings, or machine drones and rhythm tracks creating relatively lush environments that, despite their abstract tensions, always struck me as kind of soothing.
This new composition, one of the young artist’s few solo releases, is produced with a depth of field as great as anything of Korber’s I’ve heard, but with compositional structures reduced to contrastively minimal degrees where more often one formal constraint alone guides each of the six tracks, or divisions, for its full length. The palette is a familiar lattice of motorik clicks and whirrs, banks of surface noise, and pristine guitar playing, but these come now to a point of refinement where easy blending makes a never-gratuitous display of extremes possible. Korber’s guitar sounds more like a guitar than on any of my other listenings, shaken into amp-quaking, almost earthy overtones, but with a brilliant restraint that somehow keeps the moody distance of the mix’s softer parts intact. The interplay between soft and penetratingly loud, organic and synthetic, up-front or immersed, creates quite an addictive drama within such a sparse and unidirectional composition.
The process of Effacement calls to mind the consciousness of a surface left behind, an essence whose importance is derived by its own lacking. And while this is a concept that surrounds all artists dealing this heavily in silence and super-small sound bits, I find in Korber’s play of extremes a method of engagement potent both in its theory and its aesthetic The end result I think is music that sounds more in place, certainly more tangible than most else in its immediate genre. It is not at all improv, but shares the access and the excitement of that kind of setting.
>Andrew Culler, Brainwashed, 12.2005

Korber is a Swiss / Spanish guitarist and laptopper whose CV indicates that he has worked with Keith Rowe, Otomo Yoshihide and, basically, everybody else. Effacement is a mammoth work that builds from a frosting of lowercase electronics to dense, rolling waves of static and machine noise, and then recedes back to near-silence before gaining mass again. Korber likes piling on the intensity and then cutting abruptly to a more peaceful sonic vista, whose surface calm nevertheless contains the seeds of something darker that he can then work towards in the next section. Passages where the guitar is most obviously the source instrument alternate with sections of shortwave interference, sub-bass hum and needles of feedback, but the way these passages overlap, as if each section is scrubbing the preceding one clean, perhaps explains the album title. Korber’s care with the architecture of the album is what sets it apart.
>Keith Moline, The Wire, 1.2006

I've commented before how much I enjoy, in this music and elsewhere, a certain approach I associate with obsession. The act of taking a (seemingly) small slice of material, working and worrying it no end until, almost miraculously, new substance appears, previously unnoticed relationships emerge, etc. Of course, it's not the case that any piece of stuff or any arbitrary attack will produce results I end up deeming worthwhile (or is it, were I to use my ears a little better?); it requires a kind of poetic appreciation, both on the part of the creator and the recipient. Of course, here we inevitably reach the point where people's tastes begin to diverge. Some might listen to "Effacement" and hear too much dwelling in areas they think of as having been mined of the last trace of value, resulting in an overbearing quality. Not me. I can't get enough of it. Divided into six tracks, "Effacement" can nonetheless be heard as a single entity, though one which shifts gears several times, offering views out several apertures. The opening section, "Thermo", wells up from nothingness, initially producing a series of sharp, rhythmic ticks that almost sound like taps on a snare cymbal lending the work, momentarily, an oddly disjunctive jazzy sense. Within minutes, however, those ticks are enveloped by an increasingly voluminous array of engine sounds (recordings of actual motor engines, perhaps, at least in part), rotors, whirs and other effluvia including, if I'm not mistaken, voices buried somewhere inside. It's a long, gradual crescendo, hammered at incessantly, revealing layer upon layer of lovely detail that abruptly peaks around the 15 minute mark, threatening eardrum damage before suddenly subsiding into a cool wash. It almost disappears entirely, just enough traces left behind to once again grow into a related but noticeably different creature, one composed of soft steam emissions blossoming out stereophonically over a hum that is, at first, slight and unobtrusive but later, after a brief pause, heavy and threatening, the steam forced to higher levels of pressure to compensate. The third section, curiously titled "Fred Astaire", introduces some surprisingly recognizable guitar content embedded in the static stream. Sonically, it reminds me a bit of parts of Frith's ancient piece, "No Birds", using what sound like open-palmed slaps of the guitar strings. At first, the overtness of the sound renders it almost banal but as Korber's obsession sets in, as he relentlessly focuses on that narrow area, it opens up and manages to sound like something more than itself; one ceases to recognize the swats as such and simply hears music. Again, there's a movement toward increased volume, the bangs expanding out into twangs and pings (another reference, I imagine entirely coincidental, flits in and out: Branca's "The Spectacular Commodity"). It unwinds into a lovely, organ-like tone that further, and unhurriedly, evaporates to several increasingly lighter, shimmering ones. Korber obsesses even on pure tones. One of my favorite moments occurs in the following portion, where barely decipherable voices, as from some faraway garbled transmission, appear beneath the tone which itself begins to roughen and disintegrate. The voices reside just outside of interpretation, recalling Ashley's sleep mumblings, a wonderful, mysterious effect. The piece continues to granularize into a soft rumble before a split second of silence prefaces a propeller-driven assault; you feel as though your back is pressed up against the housing of a helicopter engine. Another silence--but it's not; there are slight beams of extremely high pitch that lead into yet another surprising area, probably the most "traditional" sounding of the disc. A section of shuffled (backwards?) sounds introduces a massive, descending two-note motif awash in a melancholy grandeur. "Effacement" closes with a disquieting track that begins with mingled static, voices and street noise and vortexes into an odd stereo ping pong of thudding tones as though all the previous music is being dabbed clean, mopped up by some unseen, insistent hand. Effaced, as it were. An excellent, hyper-imaginative, blessedly obsessive work.
>Brian Olewnick, Bagatellen, 11.2005

In Korber's music, a continuous investigation of the space where the sounds propagate is absolutely basic; "Effacement" is an important step in the Swiss/Spanish alchemist's discography, revealing a decisive evolution in his organization of silence and sound in parallel ways with uncharted paths to accidental ear stimulation. Tomas' efficacy in alternating dynamics, velocities and timbral choices keeps the tension level quite high, as he mixes percussive continuums of gently hammered guitar strings with ground noise shaking the auricular membranes, feedback ghosts, laptop-generated hail, microsonic gestures which fall right out of the conventions. What is found between these lines is a new listening code where we lose every control on expectation but - for a change - are guided by the firm hands of aural self-determination, far from the hostility of dangerous places yet with all the systemic alerts in full-function mode anyway.
>Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes, 11.2005

Effacement is best heard as a continuous piece, its six sections stitched together by the connective tissue of guitar and electronic hiss and buzz. Given its dynamic spectrum, it's also best appreciated at slightly higher than average volume level. There's sufficient flow and coherence to this solo recording to hear it as a process-driven whole, the flow slightly impeded (though not blocked) by the third track’s deliberately paced and repetitive guitar-body thumping. It's the sum of various sound elements recorded over a two-year period in several locations; guitar, field recordings, electronics and computer are assembled in a strikingly cinematic manner (not surprising, given Korber’s frequent collaborative work with the film and video artists Kaspar Kasics and Franz Dangelli), with titles that assume a suggestive, if not definitive, significance upon repeated listenings, though this may be Rorschachian (again, not surprising, since Korber is enrolled in the Psychology Department at Zürich University). “Thermo” develops like an ice storm, sparse and stinging pelts of accumulating density, before dropping off to a swirling wind-tunnel effect for its dying minutes. “Wuste” ("Desert") is all hissing cuts and slashes jumping from speaker to speaker, gusts of static decaying into the aforementioned thwacked guitar study, entitled (wince) “Fred Austere”. This gradually evinces some lovely chiming overtones and harmonics from the submissive guitar, but on repeated listening comes across as the section that seems to slow the flow of the overall piece. Fortunately, Effacement recovers, even though track 4 takes its sweet time to amass swirls of static around a sustained, piercing tone, ending with a jackhammer squall of feedback to saturate and satisfy. One of my favorite guitar drones since Zen Arcade-era Hüsker Dü, “Too Thin a Slice” comes forth from the spit and hiss,, a thick slab of a sustained and floating buzz, anchored to a simple bass pedal point. The album narrows the focus down to a single melancholic point on the closing “Que les jours s’en aillent” (“May the days pass”), snatches of snapped-off shrieking voices amid the initial sonic blast, dying to a slowing heartbeat that fades into the ether. Tomas Korber’s penchant for solo work continues to yield very gratifying results. There's something hermetic about it that sets it apart, an essential estrangement that flavors much of this album. Highly recommended.
>Jesse Goin, Paris Transatlantic, 10.2005

The first new release on Cut Records is by Tomas Korber (and not Thomas Körber, which I think I wrote in the past), who has played with Jason Kahn, Norbert Möslang, Dieb13, Dropp Ensemble, Keith Rowe and many more, aside his solo work (on such labels as w.m.o/r and Kissy Records. Korber plays guitar, electronics, field recordings and computer. 'Effacement' is his latest work, composed over the last two years and has six tracks. In 'Thermo', the opening track, he starts out with crackles of what could be the guitar, but the piece ends with what could be the heavily processed sound of rain, presented with an ear piercing volume. All of which happen in the course of some fifteen minutes. Korber's music is one that deals with extreme dynamics. Things can be quiet for some minutes and then slowly work it's way to a loud crescendo. One should be warned not to start the CD at a too loud volume: your neighbors will not like this. Guitar sounds that sound like a guitar can't be found on this release - everything moves in a highly electronic way, except in 'Fred Austere', in which the guitar acts as percussion instrument. Not exactly easy listening music here, and perhaps a bit long, but quite nice indeed.
>Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly, 10.2005

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