Although Berlin-based musical seekers Jules Reidy and Sam Dunscombe are friends who’ve worked together in numerous contexts over the last decade or so, Edge Games is their first, long overdue collaborative album. Over two expansive, mind-bending excursions the former’s microtonal guitar lines are woven into a gorgeously unstable mass of synthesis, field recordings, and clarinet produced by the latter, but it’s important to note that the recording process was deeply collaborative, with a rigorous yet generous back-and-forth between the duo’s sympathetic aesthetic tendencies. As Dunscombe earnestly jokes, “Think of it as being written by Jam Dundy, a synthetic person who exists when our powers combine.”
In recent years Dunscombe has pursued an adaptation of what she calls a “post-Romanian-spectralist idea of ‘Mass Plasma Synthesis,’” building a thick morass of churning sound from literally thousands of clustered sine waves that creep around using a set of pitch relations, only to be deftly subverted. It’s one of the many ways the project illuminates the album title, creatively and playfully straddling and skirting different edges. This decision gives that crushing din a delicious instability, “a sort of uncanny valley between the linear and the cyclical (the sacred and the profane),” as Dunscombe says. Reidy, playing a custom-made guitar with adjustable frets built by Berlin instrument maker and designer Sukandar Kartardinata, embraces the illusory dichotomy between static and active in the dense electronic foundation with ornate microtonal lines that alternately float atop and burrow within the churning tumult.