REVIEWS:
“Amplitude Split is a potent immersion into caustic, shape‑shifting ambient noise, where Dirk Serries’ guitar work and Phillip B. Klingler’s electronics & synths fuse into a single, unstable organism.
The core experience is its shifting sound structure: textures don’t simply evolve, they erode, fracture, and reform in unpredictable ways. Serries’ guitar often appears as a grainy, dissolving signal, stretched into metallic drones or scraped into brittle harmonic residue. Klingler counters with circuitry that feels volatile and alive, pushing synth tones toward distortion, corrosion, and near‑industrial abrasion.
What makes the album compelling is its experimental nature within a caustic, ambient framework. Instead of leaning on static drones or familiar dark‑ambient tropes, the duo embraces instability. Sounds buckle under pressure, frequencies clash, and the mix feels like a living system within a cycle of constant mutation.” (Ambient Landscape)
“New outing of collaborators: Phillip B. Klingler aka PBK and Dirk Serries released beautifully by Soundfume, a French independent label in a form of limited series lathe cut.
Four tracks with high end contents of clean cut shapes of both ambience and drone noise.
I always ask myself – how much you can explore in this terrain of obscurity even though you have had such a long and fruitful span of music making as both Phillip and Dirk have. Surely there are some times when some sort of stagnant energy takes toll. But when I have approached this album – it made me feel discovering something fresh and something that just doesn’t pass into this void where things are forgotten.
It’s good to approach life with childlike curiosity – things get better and better in time when we do it. 30-35 years ago, being a teenager who could just envision things which were impossible – I discovered that there are people out there who actually create musical forms and shapes from similar standpoint and the output just gets better and better.
So it is here, on this humble album that once again proves maturity of the musicians and equally mature vision of Epicurean music framework.” (Felthat Reviews)
(translated from German) "The two sound tinkerers Dirk Serries from Belgium near France and Phillip B. Klingler from the country between Canada and Mexico are teaming up for a new release, the former not under his alias Vidna Obmana, unlike back then, but the latter under his pseudonym PBK. "Amplitude Split" is the name of the new joint album, consisting – in a nutshell – of deconstructed ambient. For the album, Serries reactivated his old label Soundfume and continues the idea of the earlier limited tape releases with LP covers individually designed by his wife Martina Verhoeven.
For this cooperation, each of the two participants sits down at home with their technical fuss and applies it. In the case of Serries, this meant, as we know it from him, guitars with effect devices to step on, in the case of Klingler, electronic sound generators and synthesizers. Together they generate ambient, yes – but not a cozy ambient that snuggles up to you. The A-side already makes it clear that things are rather uncomfortable here.
There is a pulsation under the dark title track, somehow dark, and above it sounds that sound like an organ; if you follow Serries, you know that he is capable of producing such sounds with the guitar, and although there is a man with synths on the other end of the line, experience allows this conclusion. Creaky noises, as if taken from an old wax cylinder, thwart any hint of coziness. It sounds as if the sounds used are on two levels far apart from each other. The same applies to "Two Particle Scattering", in which loops of unknown origin that can almost be understood as beautiful are accompanied by a technical chirp that impairs the relaxing mood. A defective device that somehow drags, perhaps the brake shoes on the receipts, seems to be crunching here.
On the B-side, the two levels come closer, in "Electrid Topology Resonance" plenty of uncomfortable sounds meander at eye level, slightly oblique, next to each other, on top of each other, hesitantly. Reverse effects set in, the darkness continues. Finally, "A Threshold Theory" creates a scratchy, only fragmentarily melodic soundscape, only slightly in the background, because latently screeching effects move above it. Although these levels are again somewhat decoupled from each other, they are not as far apart as those on the A-side.
With the reactivation of his label Soundfume, Serries is pursuing a culture of remembrance, he lets it be known in the accompanying letter: Before digitization, exclusive albums liked to circulate as tapes, i.e. truly underground, and Serries alias Vidna Obmana and PBK also used this type of release at that time, for the first time in 1989 with "Compositions: Depression & Ideal" and "Monument Of Empty Colours", and for the last time in 1991 with "Fragments 3". The two now create this exclusivity by releasing "Amplitude Split" exclusively on 25 hand-pressed vinyl records, for which Martina Verhoeven designed 25 exclusive covers. It's also more valuable than the medium of tape, which has been booming again for several years." (Krautnick Magazine)