British sculptor Rachel Whiteread once poured concrete under her bed. When the liquid had set, Whiteread removed the framing device she'd constructed to prevent leakage. She'd achieved her goal: to make a cast of the space between her bedroom floor and the underside of her boxspring. She had solidified that void.

As a piece of mass art, the idea didn't catch on, of course (though Pier One would surely have sold the pastel-shaded, daisy-painted solid void for newlywed bedrooms if it had). Whiteread persisted, though-- she filled an entire house with concrete and knocked down all the walls. The solid inside of an East London row house stood somewhat marveled at until the local council decided that the land Whiteread's strange cube occupied would be better used as the impromptu dumping site for the soon-to-be decommissioned gas works up the street. For her pains though, Whiteread won the prestigious Turner Prize for Art.

Much like Whiteread, David Kristian investigates void and space on Room Tone. The title refers to a recording technique in which an engineer ascertains the ambient noise of a space so that its discrete hum of lights, the scuttle of roaches, and the delicate snoring the old git next door can be canceled out. This isn't an entirely new venture for Kristian. When we last met him, he was laying down some dope analog patch-cord funk on 1999's Beyond the Valley of the Modulars. Sneakily enough, though, he'd also been sharing stages with fellow Canadians Godspeed You Black Emperor, as well as with Autechre and Pole. All these works showcased the serious electro-acoustic side to Kristian's art.

And art Room Tone is. It's the invisible installation I always expected he'd construct. Brian Eno tried something similar on The Shutov Assembly, but Eno's pieces were mere accompaniments to Shutov's canvasses. The tracks on Room Tone, however, exist as free-standing distillations of emptiness and the space between things.

Kristian recorded the sounds of underground parking garages, tunnels, bridges, freezers, and-- erm-- Boston Terriers. He then manipulated these field recordings into woofer-damaging carpets of sound upon which you are invited to sit cross-legged, eyes shut tight, and experience the ambient hums of things. Occasionally, Kristian will drop in a muted beat (most conspicuously on "Loomis") just to lead you on a little. If you really want to put this disc to club use, though, spin it alongside any of the tribal tech stormers from Richard Harvey's User Collection and you'll have some real next-level heroin house shit. Hey, it's in the spirit of experimentation, after all.

-Paul Cooper