AGF (known at home as Antye Greie) occupies a select niche amongst electronic musicians, in that she has equal credibility as an art-for-art’s-sake experimentalist and as a producer on the edges of mainstream electronic music. ‘Filter’ is an interesting variation on the retrospective album, as she’s reworked several tracks from her back catalog.

“Danger 2010″ is a dramatic re-imagining of the Luomo track “Talk In Danger,” touching on the original only with a quote of the hook line “I ain’t here to disappoint you.” A skeletal beat anchors a wildly varied splatter of mostly abstract electronic sounds, or AGF’s processed voice. “All I can hear is our self-made audio, and the audio is trying to fit the video,” she whispers, and that is a main theme of AGF’s work — the sound of her voice, made strange and dislocated. “Piano
2010″ cleaves a little closer to the original track (from Clicks & Cuts 3), “Is this piece of sound and all the talk about evolution and progress or any process some of us very much yearn for, arise and disappear?” she intones, and what she lacks in normative object/verb agreement, she makes up for in conceptual playfulness.

For all the conceptual philosophizing AGF puts into her work, this collection pulls together the pieces from her body of work that are the most effective as music for its own sake. Even “Pianos 2010″ with it’s hectic pitter-pat percussion opens up into a lovely almost-pop hook, where she sings “if you need to be lonely to find Birdland, I leave you alone” Where her album “Words Are Missing” often seemed better on paper than in real life, Filter feels warmer and more accommodating to the listener. “Mofa (Magic AGF Remake 2010)” is positively lush, and closer to Barbara Morgenstern’s intimate romanticism than AGF’s usual, more didactic tone.

She does ask “Melody and Rhythm, are they really necessary?” but then provides no definitive answer. She can use them, but she prefers them fragmentary, provisional and fleeting. She’s more concerned with texture, acousmatic dislocation of sound from its source. Even if she speaks directly to the listener, the sense of what she says is slippery. Where the conventionally musical elements occur, in the greater context of her pieces they don’t hide their artificiality. They’re like crude brush strokes in a nominally figurative painting — they call attention to the medium, and the figurative subject can disappear.

“Filter” is AGF’s most direct invitation to listeners to her music. While still challenging, all the pieces have purpose and direction. For all their conceptual ambition they are perfectly sensuous, in that they invite you to reconsider sound as sensation.

“Danger 2010″

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