"What I've always liked about PBK's work is his sense of spectral distribution in his compositions. While many noise artists tend to bungle about leaving out big chunks of the audio spectrum and still other noisicians have no regard for this spectral quality and simply fill up every imaginable frequency with sheer volume supplying you with eternal white or pink noise, PBK has a sensitivity that elevates his work to a different class. PBK's recordings are passages in time, where frequency components travel from instant to instant, intermarry and spontaneously reproduce new composites of themselves. Never is there a neglected frequency, yet the sounds are always fundamental enough to be discreet elements of composition. His recordings consist of brief source noises which are processed and layered repeatedly, unfolding and evolving before you. His work has correctly been compared to Asmus Tietchens, and indeed the two were briefly married on the '91 release, 'Five Manifestoes'. This cd is actually two works, and they continue in the direction described above. 'Macrophage" is the harder of the two, while 'The Toil And The Reap" is much more pastoral. My favorite piece on 'Macrophage' is 'Onset', where he uses a synth to create an atmospheric reference and has all kinds of noises gathering and crashing gently, in a way that is reminiscent of Sema's harsher work. The following piece, 'Aftermath', continues this trend, but the noise sources dominate as if they have won some kind of private war. 'The Toil And The Reap" is a very romantic and surreal work, bearing titles such as 'Eyelids Closed, As In A Dream', 'Beckoning', and 'Poison Sweets Of Love'. Vidna Obmana, a long-time friend of PBK and former collaborator, makes a guest appearance on 'Beckoning'. While 'Toil' indicates a continuing development in the manipulation of noise, there is also a trend toward the use of traditional instrumentation as well. This work is a green and fertile landscape turned eerie gray and silver by the most beautiful storm clouds imaginable. I think the wind is picking up." (Audio Drudge)
"This first CD by PBK (excluding the CD with Asmus Tietchens) divides into two sections, but there isn't substantial disparity between them. 'Macrophage' has in the foreground more dark noises, extreme loops, metal clangours, destructive dins... In this first part there isn't a real development of the compositions, all the songs are complete in their compactness, they are power atoms, perfect in their circularity. Whereas in 'The Toil And The Reap" there is the working out of the sonorities in the various tracks; there are also sampled sounds near the noise, the echoes of millenary crashes of meteorites, the infinite running after each other of destruction's moments... but all is in motion. A way flows from a sound, and it develops in all the tracks, with a perfect continuity. In 'Eyelids Closed, As In A Dream' it's being oneiric allows to travel towards unknown dimensions; In 'Beckoning', Vidna Obmana's participation makes still stronger the enchanted call towards the unknown." (Batty's Tears)
"Macrophage combines stormy walls of sound with muffled rhythms; sounding at one point like a mechanized torture chamber filled with horses trotting around, but The Toil and the Reap is more conventional, mixing dangerous ambience with insistent electronics." (EST)
"Dense, ambient noise wash compositions that gush into white noise territory on currents of searing Learjet backblast and automated cinderblock factory malfunction. Falling asleep to this is challenging, though the Toil portion, from an older recording session, seeps into spacier territory--particularly "Beckoning", a collaboration with Belgian electronic composer Vidna Obmana. Ominous and complex music, packaged in a beautifully designed cardstock sleeve with raised, embossed design on the front cover." (Reign Of Toads)
