Review: Decibel New Music Ensemble’s Inland Lake at The Rechabite
Decibel New Music Ensemble’s Inland Lake at The Rechabite
Thursday, November 6, 2025
On this night, upon entering the Inland Lake, Decibel New Music Ensemble had transformed The Rechabite’s usually cavernous hall into an intimate theatre—an interior within an interior. Long paper-textile panels hung from above like wispy curtains, dividing the space so that percussion, cello and violin hovered behind the veils while clarinet/sax and figurehead Cat Hope occupied the front line. Smoke unfurled slowly through the air—an intoxicating, slightly sweet tincture—catching the light and turning the first breaths of sound visible. Sight, scent, texture and tone began to merge: an overture to a living Gesamtkunstwerk, a total artwork of sound, light and movement.
Hope’s brief introduction framed the night as a dialogue with recording: a live rendition of Decibel’s 2023 collaboration with French composer Lionel Marchetti, distilled into a two-minute prelude and a forty-minute centrepiece. Known for dissolving the boundaries between acoustic and electronic practice, Decibel have long treated loudspeakers, scores and architecture as equal instruments. Inland Lake expanded that ethos into an immersive environment where image and sound pooled, evaporated and re-formed before our eyes.
In conversation with Marchetti’s musique concrète—found sounds captured and curated—the project felt less like a written composition than a dynamic, lucid collage. In fact, Marchetti, we’re told, hadn’t notated music before this project. At times we heard the musicians live, sometimes the recording alone, and often some slippery place in between: an experience that stirred an unnerving Lynchian Club Silencio dichotomy. “Electronics-led” is accurate, but perhaps a little too clinical; the electronics and Karl Ockelford’s video footage were the lake, and the players the reeds at its edge—bending, whispering, occasionally slicing the surface.
The opening unfolded in fragile layers: eerie high pitches over sombre undertones and deep, breathy sax rumbles below. Sound drifted like the smoke, never static, always diffusing into new colours. Then, with a soft, melancholic crumple, the foreground textiles fell—the first small collapse of the night. The remaining sheets became porous screens, catching projections of waterlines, treetops and particulate light. The players stilled as the recorded track conjured a dark, quasi-industrial natural landscape: wind tunnels and a sustained violin line stretched taut as wire across a ravine.
Soon grit entered the mix—crackling static mirrored by visual noise as light beams snagged on drifting haze. Sohan Ariel Hayes’ projections dissolved into muted greys, painterly swirls that felt less like narrative than memory being stirred. The texture—electrostatic, granular, tactile—enveloped the space, at once ambient and physical. Hayes functioned as much as a performer as any instrumentalist; his manipulation of imagery acted as a score in conversation, completing the ensemble’s sensory circuit.
Around the twenty-minute mark, pinprick beams pierced the dark from upstage—narrow cones of light like forest shafts at dusk. The room felt sentient; these beams weren’t decoration so much as searching, curious threads scanning for life. Muffled drumming thudded while Morse-like beeps and radio-tuning sweeps blurred the boundary between live and recorded sound. Light strokes, like marching ants, traced the rear ledge of the stage—a visual complement to the auditory static.
Distorted voices emerged as Hope manipulated radio dials, adding another found element with unpredictable results. The dramaturgy between presence and absence intensified: a nostalgia and mystique reminiscent of The Caretaker’s haunted architectures. The inland lake was no longer a place but an inward topography, an inhabited interior whispering names beneath its surface. Memory as palimpsest: the living scoring past and present at once.
Instrumentation was diverse and creative, conjuring an array of evocative sound. Metal chime bowls glowed at differing pitches; a tone like breath through a shell sounded across the stereo field; a distant, animal-like call hovered just beyond recognition. Each timbre extended the visual palette, folding hearing into sight. Late in the piece, the projections sharpened and the music clarified in tandem—crystalline tones circled by pops and static, like tripped circuitry reminding us every enchantment is also electrical. A handheld camera’s meandering gaze wandered through trees, its movement tethered almost imperceptibly to the electronics’ slow respiration. Perhaps it was the lingering haze, but by this point the work had settled into an elegant hypnosis: the ensemble threading glass-edge accents through the drift. High pitches, yes, but not dissonant—more like pins holding a delicate fabric in place.
As the piece drew towards close, we returned to water—passing water—while the sound loosened into a liminal lull. The drums rolled like distant thunder, a weather front building but never quite breaking before receding. The piece didn’t so much end as it thinned, asking us to listen into the space itself—the quiet of The Rechabite hall, the shuffling of bodies, the after-image of light on paper. Absence revealed as one more kind of sound.
What made Inland Lake compelling was not novelty (though the staging was thoughtful and the sound design immaculate), but its ethical ear. Decibel have long treated space as an instrument, recording it as a partner rather than a prop, and here, that partnership felt grounded in care. When the live players stepped back, they invited attention to the inhuman textures of tape hiss and the images that refused to resolve. When they stepped forward, it was with humility—honouring the electronics as ecology, not scaffolding. The performance became a model Gesamtkunstwerk for the digital age: a fusion of art forms where every element, from scent to circuitry, shared agency in a single living system.
Some listeners may prefer their new music overtly virtuosic or more clearly navigable. Inland Lake offers another kind of depth—built from patience, scale and sensitivity to surfaces. In the transformed hall, with smoke tinting the light and paper fluttering like skin, Decibel gave us less a concert than a slow act of looking and listening. By the time the sound fell away, the room itself seemed changed. Or perhaps it was us.
CAT LANDRO
Photo by Edify Media