Text by Dom Stevenson
At a moment when music videos often chase algorithmic circulation, Iljal moves slower and with greater structural intent. The work is a moving-image piece by composer and contemporary artist Tyler Friedman, created in ongoing collaboration with Aron Sanchez-Baranda. Together, they operate within an expanded field where sound, image, and ecological research co-constitute one another, positioning the video as inquiry rather than a conventional accompaniment.
Friedman’s practice revolves around microtonal tuning and structured improvisation, treating sound as both architectural and ecological material. His compositions explore how alternative tuning systems and subtle variations in pitch can create complex temporal and spatial relationships, allowing listeners to experience sound as a network of interdependent flows. Across installations, performances, and recorded works, he emphasises listening environments that unfold gradually, foregrounding both resonance and relational dynamics rather than conventional melodic or harmonic narratives.
When asked whether improvisation mirrors ecological systems – and how microtonality sits within that relationship – Friedman resists the language of unpredictability. Insofar as improvisations are possible outcomes of enclosed systems of defined parameters, there is certainly a parallel,” Friedman explains. I wouldn’t frame nature in terms of unpredictability. For him, tuning is a single aspect of a larger network of conditions. Just as certain biological forms challenge anthropocentric models of embodiment, alternative tunings also have their own internal logics and tendencies, as well as their own limitations and refusals, similar to the way that specific ecosystems encourage certain biological patterns.
The vibrantly coloured imagery in Sanchez-Baranda’s video, in turn, shapes the compositional space. The fluid motions of the sea anemones visualise the underlying flows of voltage that are pointillistically articulated by the pitched percussion, Friedman notes, adding that the work blurs the real and the unreal, the biological and the synthetic, the natural and the alien and the beautiful and the strange. In response, he says, I certainly strove for a sense of being enveloped by melodic currents while designing the sonic environment.
That balance between structure and immersion carries into METLASR, released March 27 via Radicant Editions. Friedman describes the record as very explicitly an expression of a series of confluences, bringing diverse material, cultural, and geographic sources into relation. Despite this breadth, its sounds share compatible and relatively pure overtone spectra, articulating variations of a single central, yet invisible, flow. Conceived as a broader trajectory unfolding across listening situations, performances, and exhibition contexts in New York, Berlin, and London – with its live debut at Morphine Raum Berlin on March 17 – the album reaches toward what he describes as a dialectical approach to sound, informed by a speculative, idealistic impulse.
