*2022 stock.* When does our experience of sound become "music"? In the tradition of John Cage and Morton Feldman, in which sounds – and silences – can just be themselves, Thomas DeLio plays with the spaces between your ears as much as the sounds he puts there.

In short, be advised this album is replete with clicks, silences, and brief sound events. Stripped bare, it plays with time and space and the minimum conditions for music. It gives the term ‘experimental music’ meaning.

DeLio’s approach to composition involves reducing the music’s surface to just a few sounds separated – pushed apart – by large quantities of silence; sound events pushed into isolation. Often people comment that his music is about silence. However, it is actually about sound. His use of silence to frame sound, so we may experience it in new ways, remains one of the hallmarks of his music. It is also about time. Time can be understood as a container into which sounds can be placed; and they can be placed at any moment within that container.

Thomas DeLio’s work emerges from a lifelong quest to transform how we experience sound as music. He is fond of repeating a William Carlos Williams comment about Gertrude Stein: “Stein has gone systematically to work smashing every connotation that words have ever had, in order to get them back clean.” DeLio, too, seems to have done just this: he has gradually moved away from notions of gesture and process in order to get sound back “clean.”

Transparent Waves, his fourth collection on Neuma, includes more than a dozen sparse-yet-compact electroacoustic and instrumental works. For over 20 years DeLio has been engaged with the poetry of P. Inman, one of the most significant experimental poets working today. But don’t expect a conventional setting of a lyric. The album opens with and of “of”, one of the most radical of their collaborations. The sounds of the composition are derived entirely from various readings of the text. However, rarely are the words from those readings recognizable. Rather, they are absorbed into the substance of the music: “The goal of each of my ‘settings’ of [Inman’s] poems is to create a parallel experience to reading each poem…”