* 2025 Stock, Edition of 100 *There’s an abiding patience that animates A Checking of Progress, the 2018 release by JM Iversen. Known for his precise, quietly radical approach to electroacoustic composition, Iversen uses this album as both field report and speculative fiction - a transmission from some liminal territory where change registers as resonance. The thirteen pieces on offer, each brief but sharply etched, are structured like entries in a sonic diary, with motifs emerging, dissolving, and reappearing in new guises. It’s less a display of virtuosity than a careful cultivation of presence: the music rewards attentive listening with moments of crystalline beauty and unexpected unease.
Tracks such as “Harmegås (Radiolength Version)” and “Frontale Pannefjær (Album Version)” operate in the laboratory of subtlety. Iversen’s palette is tactile, favoring the interplay of natural and electronically-processed timbres. Fluttering drones and mysterious percussive interjections inhabit a sound world somewhere between improvisation and method. Frequently, the compositions pivot on a single sonic detail - a pitched artifact, a glint of feedback - inviting the listener to reorient with each shift in terrain. By keeping gestures compact yet open-ended, Iversen renders transition itself as a kind of protagonist.
True to its title, A Checking of Progress also wrestles with the notion of movement. Rather than dramatic climaxes, the album’s arc is one of gradual accumulation: quiet flux replaces grand gestures, with each fragment accumulating weight and meaning through context. This is music that whispers of process, adapted from fieldwork as much as from the studio. With a duration just over forty-five minutes, the experience is enveloping without ever resorting to excess - a model of compositional economy that finds richness in brevity. By its final track, A Checking of Progress feels less like a conclusion than an invitation to dwell in uncertainty, its finest passages acting as subtle agents of suspension. The album stands as a testament to Iversen’s ongoing exploration of change, memory, and the mutable boundary between the heard and the imagined.
