Attention is the name of the game with ?Pets.? Perhaps the focus is on silence, or quiet pockets of movement within silence. The five tracks here are minimal, often to the extreme. What sounds emerge are glimpses, like water dripping or paper crinkling. (often they also sound like the bodily noises made by jock-turned giant frog Chet in the cult classic ?Weird Science,? but I digress.) Occasionally there is a louder pulse, and voice, as in the opener, ?Omo,? and on the final track, ?Celine,? features a female voice seeming to struggle to read an article in French about that author.

The struggle to vocalize may also prove to be entry into these five tracks.

Germany?s Olaf Hochherz explores the barely there moments of acoustics within void, and your appreciation of that may depend on your tolerance for moments that stay small. He calls these pieces an ?attempt to describe a sound-based form of life,? and seems to explore that angle at the micro-level. The brokenness of language, and the halting presence of both sound and meaning, make for alternately inspired and annoyed listening. ?Pets? presents a natural space that may or may not be a rich space to inhabit. Hochherz challenges the listener both to pay more attention and struggle to keep it. 6/10 -- Mike Wood (8 April, 2008)