Point Contact : A Fleeting Point in Terrifying Beauty
It feels uncommon to see an academic project lifted up to the level of commercially available music, so Point Contact as an artist and their LP A Fleeting Point in Terrifying Beauty collectively pique the curious ear. The ensemble is led by Jo Wills, who has kept himself busiest as cofounder of the WW Records label and making electronic music as Old Man Diode. This work first appeared in 2023 as a multimedia stage performance by two instructors from Austria’s Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences alongside Wills, himself also a professor at London’s Guildhall School, and their students. Wills has since continued the project with fellow musicians Guy Wood and Rasmus Zschoch contributing field recordings and live instrumentation.
For such a pedigree of synthesized music, Wills and Point Contact play much of A Fleeting Point in Terrifying Beauty analog, bringing to it a very noise-rock, experimental-metal sensation. Most of the pieces included on the finished LP feature Wood’s heavy drumming and dutiful, purposeful strings from both Wills and Zschoch. Frankly, in both playing and production the drums seem particularly relentless and invasive, as if meant for an entirely different album. It’s reminiscent of the feeling you might get on first hearing John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space, wondering who stumbled in to the Van Gelder studio with all those damn bells.
“Shoot Like a Meteor from Dizzy Height” is a virtuoso effort of overlapping acidic keyboards with live drums added a third of the way through, the latter eventually designed to blast inwards and fall away in decrescendo multiple times. “Unfathomable Caves of the Sea” processes Point Contact’s instruments to mimic low, bleating brass sections, ambient in the most extreme Aphex Twin sense. But otherwise, the electronics on A Fleeting Point in Terrifying Beauty seem limited to filters and post-production on the live instruments and found sounds, and those few uses feel repeated everywhere.
High-pitched whines float above many of the album’s main musical lines as grasslike rustling comes up from below, each haunting as a ghost does, irritating as smoke does. “Hold Cloud” and “Augur” form a miniature suite on the theme of being overtaken. The first track imagines a giant’s stomps or pounding machinery following time signatures that get more complicated with each passing minute, as the second uses a more traditional hard-rock groove that loses detail as it gains volume like an engine roaring to life. There’s also the subtly dramatic “Crows,” where Wood and Wills combine drums and backmasked samples to develop polyrhythms underneath drones from wobbly effected guitar and more.
Point Contact seem to take sonic cues from some of Krautrock’s harshest zeniths and most quietly brooding atmospheres, alternately trying to weave them together or stitch them side-by-side. Initially inspired by humanity’s relative insignificance when compared to the universe and all else it contains, A Fleeting Point in Terrifying Beauty ultimately feels a little unsure of how to use or describe contrast.
Label: WW
Year: 2025
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