Temperament as Waveform is a transatlantic exchange in process and poetics. Between 2010 and 2012, UK-based sound artist Lee Patterson and Austin’s Vanessa Rossetto traded recordings, objects, and digital files by post - each response reshaping and folding the other's sonic worlds. The album merges four wide-ranging improvisational/concrète works, each combining manipulated field recordings with amplified objects, cassette fragments, instrumental events, and filtered signal noise.​

Opener “Everything We Know About Anything Indicates That Nothing Is Ever Easy” ushers the listener into a restless terrain: shifting layers of urban recordings, ambiguous scraping, throbbing electric signals, and distant voices. The compositional strategy favors density and collaged alliance - each moment is fraught with microclimates, unexpectedly shifting scale, as grit, decay, and electronic signals pass through sections of pure, controlled touch. On “The Highs and Lows of Cross-Atlantic Collaboration,” telephone drones, water, and environmental veins are disturbed by bursts of electrical activity and insistent instrumental color. The final, shortest piece turns literally on “an indication of presence,” hanging on ambiguity and sonic withholding.

Throughout the album, there is a sense of story without plot: environmental clues, interference patterns, and semi-musical gestures nest into a larger, echoic structure. Rather than conventional improvisation, Temperament as Waveform is sculpted with attention to memory, failure, and the porous line between intention and accident. Cleverly edited and keenly observed, the album is a subtle testament to what remote collaboration can become: a flickering sound environment where two sensibilities meet, diverge, and recombine into a music of enigmatic intimacy - fitful, exploratory, and alive to the unstable charge of the everyday.