Rachel Beetz “Tone Keepers” cassette (Outside Time)

How good does it feel to pull back from time to time? To really shed excess, more-ness, and follow a single path with intention? The exploration of one thing can illuminate corners of the world overlooked by minds pushed in increasingly omnidirectional cycles of want. Tone Keepers is a collection of four compositions by flutist, composer, and sound artist Rachel Beetz that follow a straight line into unexpected territory. Each piece revolves around a simple but inventive technique for generating acoustic sound coupled with a discrete mode of electronic processing, spinning out variations on the unique effect it produces. Beetz encourages sounds to crystalize rather than expand, uncovering new permutations and emotional dimensions as curiosity leads her forward. The ear of the listener becomes a magnifying glass as the mind affixes itself to the music, its focus sharpening with each cyclical return.

Beetz’s music luxuriates in the sound and motion of the world as it exists, with all its odd angles, joyful confluences, and irreconcilable mysteries. Her practice is shaped by the people around her, both the helpful guides and trolls of the most frustrating nature, which she explores in the extensive liner notes for Tone Keepers. On “Gate,” Beetz blows gasping rushes of air through a closed piccolo, the sound clipped by a sensitive digital gate that erases everything except the hiss, huffs, and key-taps. It is performed as a way of processing the many gates kept in the name of “proper tone” and normative expectations of how music should be made. “Feedback,” in which the flute becomes a resonating tube connecting a small microphone and earbud to create bulbous wobbling frequencies, was made in the wake of an experience with a predictably misogynistic sound guy. The prickly lattice patterns of “Delay” were born of a listening game Beetz created to explore the time-shifting qualities of music, a deep peering into a mirror reflecting one’s most recent past self.

Each piece on Tone Keepers glows with the delight of answering the question “what happens if I do this?” The album is crafted with equal parts play and precision, full of the thrilling feeling of learning something new. Hovering just beneath the surface are Beetz’s experiments with the tactile nature of sound, which have included capturing the ambience of abandoned grain silos and creating scores for steamed eggs, as well as her work with pioneering ensemble Wild Up, where she engages with the winding history of the avant-garde. But here those branches are filed away to a fine tip, distilling magnificence into elegance. Give it enough time and just one thing can start to feel like absolutely everything.