The Wire September 2003
“Tim Catlin’s Slow Twitch initially suggests misaligned machines, their rattling bolts struggling to hold everything together while the torque of the engines slowly unscrews itself to its own demise. However, this Australian sound artist has realised an impressive trompe l’oreille charming an arsenal of prepared guitars to mimic the environmental clatter of an archaic air compressor or a grizzled refrigeration unit or whatever obnoxious machine came to hand that never quite works. Fans, e-bows and customised automatons keep his guitar strings in constant motion, building dense layers of rapidfire clinkings and glistening magnetic disturbances. Slow Twitch resonates with the conceptual self-propulsion of Paul Panhuysen’s robotic guitar ensembles, blurring lines between metal machine music and holy minalism.” Jim Haynes
“Tim Catlin has made maybe the greatest experimental guitar album you’re least likely to hear. Slow Twitch, released on the under-represented Australian label Dr. Jim’s. If you’ve bought a Christian Fennesz, Oren Amarchi, Birchville Cat Motel, or Sunroof album you owe it to yourself to pick up Tim Catlin’s Slow Twitch. It’s really that good. Slow Twitch is not another Max/MSP demonstration of deconstructed guitar samples, nor is it a improvised wall of sound from blistered amplifiers struggling to keep up with high voltage attacks; rather Catlin constructs very low-tech systems of fans, e-bows, and other mechanical devices that keep the guitar strings moving. These experiments are then immaculately recorded with little to no post-production, probably just a couple of edits, snips, and crossfades. In the end, Catlin’s automatically propelled guitars resemble the resonant frequencies that Jean-Francoise Laporte coaxed out of a bunch of air compressors (or perhaps a Zamboni) on his stellar Mantra disc. Rasping striations of metal vibrating against metal form complex drone harmonics that double and triple throughout the spectrum, with placid low end rumblings sympathetically resonating with angelic shimmerings. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.”
“Although the CD cover tells us Catlin plays electronic and acoustic guitar, no subsequent sound gives any hint of this. The first of the four tracks resonates with blistering industrial tones that Catlin, in the manner of a sculptor, has hollowed out, pared down or embellished. The musician’s craft focussed on the act of producing the sound itself. The second track is both dense and ethereal, recalling the strident energy of an electric guitar with layer upon layer of sound. The music’s precision derives from a complete lack of pretence, the process reaching its logical conclusion in an unforced manner. The third track is quite short, consisting of rhythmic, low-end vibrations, resembling incantations. The fourth piece by contrast, is long and rich in variation, giving the impression of intermittent streams of light. According to the information on the cover, Catlin uses small, low-tech mechanical devices to produce his guitar sounds. In my opinion, his greatest achievement is that this process cannot be heard; instead we hear the sound of the mechanical devices themselves. In the same way, in the early 20th Century, musicians attempted to include the sounds of the modern world in their compositions. Catlin transforms music using mechanical devices just as mechanical devices once transformed the world. From the perspective of our electronic age, this throwback to electricity and mechanics is a reflection, a retrospective and yet a dramatic leap into the future. Minimalist yet highly enticing.” Noel Tachet
RealTime Arts Earbash
“Slow twitch: an expansion of an impulsive, reflexive and instantaneous gesture. The title is a poetic description of the dynamic energy freeze-framed on Tim Catlin’s latest release. Imagine hitting pause half-way though King Crimson’s Red. Rather than all going dead, your CD player waiting for the cue to resume, you are left with Robert Fripp’s last chord sustained indefinitely until you decide to resume play. Visually, we experience these ruptures of temporality every time we take a photo or pause a video. The transient nature of sonic energy makes such an effect impossible, but listening to Slow Twitch is suggestive of this hypothetical experience. Catlin has taken the shimmering ephemeral nature of the guitar’s indefinite identity and exploded it into a fine mist. The guitar is not a solid entity, its location in the mix no longer governed by a common understanding of how the elements of rock fit together. Free of such constraints, the sound is allowed to evolve and mutate, pulsate, rattle, hum, buzz, crackle, breathe, and resonate of its own accord. Using simple low-tech automatons, fans and e-bows, mechanical devices to keep the strings moving, Catlin has refined a system where the energy and harmonic complexity of the electric guitar is allowed to develop without the self-importance of the virtuoso performer, the epic narrative, or a formulaic mix schematic. Not concerned with preserving the instrumental identity of the guitar (a tenuous prospect given the past 50 years of rock & pop production), he has detached it from such narrow definitions to discover unknown sound-worlds only ever faintly alluded to in rock music. Furthermore, the extension of the instrument through mechanical preparations (rather than computer processing), has produced complex acoustic phenomena in the unpredictable interactions between machine and instrument. The result is an incredibly rich acoustic soundscape, within which one may forget the origin of the sounds and marvel at their foreign beauty.” Phillip Pietruschka