Jon DALE
“Theatre”

“It’s music where nothing happened. It’s the kind of music somebody might write in Adelaide, Australia. Nothing happened.” –Morton Feldman

Theatre is De la Catessen’s second venture into the archive of Jon Dale. Originally released in a tiny CD-r edition of 50 copies on Tristes Tropiques in 2019, Theatre now reappears in an edition of 150 glass-mastered CDs. Theatre sees Jon Dale eschewing the hearthwarm drones of his previous album on de la Catessen, Last Blues, and dwelling upon an elusive aural concept: a limbo. Theatre hums with an occupied silence, heightened by scattered expectant sounds: a door opens or closes; muffled voices murmur nearby. As almost nothing continues to happen, the listener occupying the silence seems to hover at the edge of (non)existence. It’s tempting to classify Theatre as a purely conceptual listening experience, or to compare it to listening to someone who is in the quiet act of listening to something else, just out of earshot. But at its heart, Theatre is a simple and elegant manifestation of the dichotomy that dynamizes minimalism: how little of something — versus how much of nothing — must be.