In installation form, Meta consists of four transducers that are attached to the wall on each corner of a perfectly drawn six foot square. Meta is also a quadraphonic piece, composed to be spatially moving along the four assigned channels. When the listener places his/her ear to the wall the work can be experienced differently every time activating not only the internal space of the wall but also the listener’s focused ear. In this work Richard Garet focuses on investigating, exploring, and drawing attention to background noise and the sounds that we encounter in our common spaces. In many ways these sounds are derivative of our own experiences, actions, and living choices. They become emitted by commodities, means of communications, and our own relationships with technology and space. 

Meta references this, and it departs from the objectification of a mundane experience. On many occasions we encounter ourselves hearing something of which the source of the origin we do not recognize. Therefore in order to discover it we then find ourselves listening to the walls to come to understand that the sounds in fact are in the walls or coming from the other side of the wall.

"The lowercase aesthetic and strategies have their origins with the vanguardists like Robert Ashley, Morton Feldman, and Luc Ferrari; and something of a global lowercase community emerged in the late '90s and early '00s when composers like Bernhard Gunter, Richard Chartier, and Steve Roden began exploring works that were deliberately understated in form, while details abound in the low volumes and gently massed textures. Richard Garet's Meta is an austere distillation of many of the ideas proposed by these and many other likemined artists - the amplification and abstraction of background noise. Garet never states what specifically he captures in the overarching concept of background noise, but we can postulate that could mean the hidden chirping of data from the technologies that surround us, the hushed din of the urban landscape, the thumming hiss of ventilators, and the waves of static that silently glide on the paths of radio. As such, Garet heightens particular resonant frequencies, whisping any particular mundane sound source into that which resembles a sublime hush, and telescopes the sharp glare of unknowable, diamond-scraped surfaces into a slow-motion tumble with protracted passages of austere stillness. At times, Garet's rarification process extracts sine waves of piercing intensity that shocks against the composition's more emblematic forms akin to ASMR recordings for delicate sibilance and graceful electroacoustic poetics. Brilliant, as always."
(aquariusrecords.org)