(Free Improvisation, Abstract, Noise, Experimental) MIMEO (Music In Movement Electronic Orchestra) [Keith Rowe, Kaffe Matthews, Thomas Lehn, Cor Fuhler, Phil Durrant, Rafael Toral, Christian Fennesz]- Sight - 2007, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

sight is the title of the fifth album by the electronic improvisation supergroup MIMEO.
sight is a project inspired by stories of the American painter Cy Twombly that describe how he took up the occasional practice of drawing and painting blindfolded, creating art despite being unable to use the most obvious sense required for the task.
For the sight project each of the eleven members of MIMEO spread across Europe were asked to place approximately five minutes of sound anywhere they chose onto a blank sixty minute CDR. This was done independently of one another, with no communication between the musicians about how or where the music should be distributed on the disc.
This process was only completed after the musicians had spent considerable time considering the task at hand, trying to understand what their colleagues may be doing. Finally in late 2006 the finished CDRs were sent to one group member, Marcus Schmickler, who then compiled all eleven discs onto one single CDR, superimposing the eleven pieces of music over each other to create a single work. This task was completed without listening to the music at any stage.
The CDR was then later sent to myself at Cathnor Recordings where it remained unplayed until it was sent to the pressing plant.
Bagatellen review by Brian Olewnick:
I don’t guess it’s necessary to rehash the particulars behind this recording; hard to imagine anyone with even a passing interest not being well aware of how “Sight” got to be that way. I’ll only pause to note that one of the aspects which I anticipated being in play, a kind of Prisoner’s Dilemma variation, is, as near as I can discern from the evidence in the final outcome, pretty much a non-factor. Perhaps because with MIMEO, “cooperation” (in PD terms) is more or less automatic, perhaps more pertinently because there exists no individual “gain” to be realized when the goal is group-oriented. I’ll also leave aside the Cy Twombly inferences, only referencing the painting in Houston recently posted on IHM which, indeed, isn’t a bad visual analogue of the disc at all. Whatever the case, I’m most interested here in how it sounds as music.
And it sounds damned good. Impossible as it would have been, I do wish I could’ve heard this with no prior knowledge whatsoever, not only with regard to the structural strategy but even going so far as to not know the identities of the musicians involved. There’s no way I can say how this would have hit me if thus “blindfolded” but to the extent I can put myself in that situation, I think I’d’ve found this to be a wonderful document, a lovely and spacious hour of improvisation. I don’t think—and this is one of the central issues raised by “Sight”—that I would have found any reason to suppose that this was not a simultaneous group improvisation; a restrained one, to be sure, but no more so in that regard than any number of quiet improv performances of recent years. I’d certainly have sat thinking, “Ah, what a beautiful mix of tones there; the musicians active at that moment really chose their sounds and placement well!” When, of course, nothing of the sort occurred. Or did it? How far can one stretch the idea of communication of intent? What does this say about “communication” in group improv if I hear it when it’s not there? One of the fascinating aspects of the recording is the balance between the MIMEO members own sensitivities in choosing where and how to deploy there brief opportunities and how the listener inevitably imposes patterns on things that are, in some important respects, unintentional and patternless. One of the first mental images I had while listening was of looking down on a public area, say a park quadrangle, where various activities are taking place: people walking, dogs playing, cars motoring, etc. You start forming formal connections between actors, imputing causal character to essentially random events: “That woman and the car on the other side of the drive, walking in parallel, about to bisect the arc formed by the three cavorting dogs. Ah, how wonderfully that worked!” etc. If you were to invest these actors with a smidgen of awareness as to their interaction and impart to them the fact that someone’s watching, maybe you begin to approximate the kind of activity heard on “Sight”.
While there’s the added “problem” of not always being able to figure out (given the types of instruments in use) whether two or three individual sounds are being generated by one, two or three musicians, one of the joys of the album is when overlapping occurs, when the individual elements that have been emerging periodically from the silence abut and intermingle. Though generally (unsurprisingly) on the quiet, sparse side, there are several explosions of sound (one suspects Pita, Schmickler, etc. but who knows or cares?) that, if anything, are grouped toward the middles of the hour. You can imagine several of the musicians anticipating that the multi-country asynchronous performance might tend toward something of a quiet-loud-quiet shape and contribute accordingly. But the central point is that none of the sounds seems any more “out of place” than the appearance of an ice cream truck while looking down at that public park. Something about the intentions and sensitivity of the musicians in MIMEO worked toward ensuring that whatever the result, it would read as conceptually coherent, sonically absorbing and intellectually challenging.
I like it a whole helluva lot and find it forms a fitting companion piece to the almost simultaneously released “The Room”. Concentrated mental introspection on the one hand and intra-continental telepathy on the other, enormous amount of food for thought in each.

Members of MIMEO on this particular release are:
Gert-Jan Prins
Thomas Lehn
Kaffe Matthews
Peter Rehberg
Jerome Noetinger
Marcus Schmickler
Christian Fennesz
Phil Durrant
Rafael Toral
Cor Fuhler
Keith Rowe