Yannick Dauby
ch?ng, factory
TAIWAN KALERNE EDITIONS kal05 CD (2015)
ch?ng, factory starts with a sense of mystery and vague foreboding somewhat like Geir Jensens’ volcanic field recordings from the island of Stromboli from a couple of years ago, but with man-made rather than natural sources. Committed to his hard-drive, I’m supposing, are sounds from a disused factory in Taiwan. Soon, the music becomes progressively more ambient. That’s “ambient” with a small “a”. You are really aware of the surroundings in this recording, and Dauby clearly set out to develop a lot of ideas in this one 43 minute piece.
This took me back to my own experience of working in the final year of a fine art degree where I and a handful of other students were able to operate mostly unsupervised inside a huge disused door factory. These kinds of places are fascinating; this door factory had huge, dilapidated spaces, walkways and raised offices thirty feet off the ground, still with the occasional brochure or pages from an order book strewn around alongside disused and abandoned old machinery. Pigeons had moved in, perched on the rafters looking down at us. Here, Dauby wrings every last possibility out of the location. I’m becoming obsessed with this piece of work – it releases new and fascinating information with each listen. You can almost hear the walls crumbling with age around you. Sometimes the music is barely audible, as if whatever stimulus Dauby is broadcasting into the environs is wandering off of its own accord and getting lost in the network of chambers.
Kalerne Editions is run by Dauby himself, but is not a label per se, despite also offering works by other field recordists Marc and Olivier Namblard. Rather, Kalerne exists as an easy arena for Dauby to collect his work concerned with “…experimental music informed by environment to naturalist field recordings and sound anthropology…” and to document any collaborative projects within that sphere. Great oversized full-colour sleeve in a substantial protective pvc wallet.