Tagged: sound art

November 17, 2013

Getting Through Accidentals

An astonishing outpouring of energy from Invisible Things on their Home Is The Sun (PORTER RECORDS PRCD-4069) album. The label Porter Records is often home to some far-out free jazz enterprises, but this bizarre monster has most of its clammy paws planted in the art-rock camp…the duo of American players Mark Shippy and Jim Sykes realise most of this dazzling escapade with a guitar and drums set-up, although Shippy also adds rich keyboard layers and sings, and guest player Jeff Ziegler is on hand to supply further keyboard goodiness like so much cookie dough. Drummer Jim Sykes apparently bases his work on a deep awareness of percussion methods from Sri Lanka, applied to modern instruments…given that Sri Lankan percussion traditions are said to be about 2500 years old, and at one time the culture had over 30 different types of drum, this is quite an achievement. On Home Is The Sun, there are 17 short tracks which are in fact index points for a enormous whole thing, a continual and overwhelming flying carpet of remarkable music. I think both players come from a Chicago background, with respective histories in bands Parts and Labor, Grooms, Marnie Stern, U.S. Maple, Miracle Condition, and Shorty, and have been honing this approach to their craft since they met in 2009. Impressive, and not just admirably clever; it rattles and roars with unhinged, psychedelic mayhem. Personally I far prefer this open-ended and juicy lubed-up style of playing to the tight-ass precise renditions of Om, for example. The electrifying cover art truly lives up to the music within. From 9th October 2012.

Seth Cooke realised Pneuma (LF RECORDS LF028) using just his crotales (percussion instrument, a specific type of cymbal array) on one track and a pneumatic drill on the other, hence the title. Certainly a process piece, requiring long duration; two tracks at nearly half an hour apiece; gradual shifts in timbre across continual tones. But not an infuriating piece of semi-preciousness, Cooke’s work retains a steely core of hard-edged realism and never drifts off into the clouds of ivory-tower aesthete-land, where velvet-caped fops may shower you with lilacs. If you just read about the crotales piece, it may put you in mind of soppy singing-bowl type music, but when you actually hear it it’s as sturdy as a sheet of tin; it just hangs in the air like an unyielding, brutal, fact. The drill piece is also surprising; far from the industrial noise-brutality some listeners or fans of SPK might expect, it’s an ingenious well-structured composition whose every waking moment is a vehicle for contemplation. “Drills are the aspiration of the male saga”, is all he’s prepared to tell us, by means of an obscure quote; no doubt he’s alluding to the phallic qualities of the pneumatic drill, a factor that leads most road workers to take up the job in order to cure their problems of impotence and flaccidity. There’s nothing like feeling a powerful metal shaft surging between your thighs to cure those erectile tissue problems. If Cooke can tame the savagery of this particular mechanical penis-like device, methinks he could set out a plausible plan for altering the entire mind-set of the modern world, by a combination of chemical processes and other, more occult, strategies. Given Cooke’s wide range of useful skills – he is a sound artist, percussionist who plays unusual objects, and a practising psycho-therapist – anything seems possible. From 27 December 2012.

Third release in from the Norwegian Va Fongool label, and this time we’re moving away from the high-energy high-decibel clattery rough-house parties that Eirik Tofte gravitates towards for his Oslo-based label. PGA are the duo of Jan Martin Gismervik and Fredrik Luhr Diterichson, who perform all of Corrections (VAFCD003) using just an acoustic bass and drum set, though the duo are joined by the brass players Nørstebø and Larsen for a couple tracks. Very far from jazz, music, or even improvised music – this intense, minimal stuff just creaks like broken boughs of an old oak, while sloughing its way out of the speakers like three-day old porridge. I just love the severe and sullen aspect of their sound, which makes virtually no concessions, refusing to be held hostage and turning many debtors away from its door. The pair themselves are far from being cranky old geezers though, and come to us from lively backgrounds in group playing – Moskus, Skadedyr, Sagstuen, Karokh, and the Wolfram Trio, where they both played – see here for a review of that album, also on this label. Apparently the rhythm section couldn’t make themselves heard about the blurty racket from tenor saxman Halvor Meling, so their only course of action was to have him assassinated. The Norwegian Mafia were hired to do the job, and they sealed Meling’s feet in a bucket of cement and then threw him in the Hobølelva. With “Old Hooty” out of the picture, Gismervik and Diterichson could proceed unimpeded with their new minimal plan. Sure enough, pared down to a duo of scrapey wooden and metallic noise-production using highly innovative methods, this pair have a chance to shine – or at least to glimmer like the limpid light of a pond in a heavy fog under the obscured winter sun. Arrived 23 October 2012.

We last heard from Hitoshi Kojo with his Omnimoment CD from 2012, although this unclassifiable Japanese musician is also one half of Jüppala Kääpiö, a name which betrays his likely preoccupation with modern Finnish music and its eccentric psychedelic clutter. High Tide Mirror (OMNIMOMENTO OM06 / SHINING DAY SHINE 12) contains six pieces of very accomplished layered studio working, where whatever instruments were originally used are cunningly blended and morphed into kaleidoscopes of shimmering, bustling sound. Not a surface is left unfilled in these incredibly “busy” scapes, presenting elaborate views of a colourful fantasy world. I am always deeply impressed by the surface beauty of this music at first listen, but then find my attention wandering and I begin to wonder if they really need to be nine or twelve minutes long, since little of any value is added by the duration. Instead of of 6 long tracks, it might be interesting if Kojo were to present 24 short tracks, where the intense and dazzling strangeness of his inventions could astound the listener for a precious moment, then swiftly fade away like a vanishing dream. The cover is fantastic, made of screenprinted card with a cut-out hole and a triangular flap, with sumptuous images of foliage and sealife.

November 1, 2013

What was Once there is Now Gone: desert-Western blackened sludge doom packed into tiny CD-R

Bird of Omen, What was Once there is Now Gone, Hand Hewn Timbre, 3″ CD-R (2013)

Bird of Omen is a recent project by the unknown man who was behind the blackened drone doom metal act Monument of Urns. All the releases by MoU were issued by the artist’s own Hand Hewn Timbre imprint on tiny CD-Rs. Now MoU has been laid to rest for the time being and in its stead is Bird of Omen whose releases so far are also on tiny CD-R discs. The album under review is BoO’s second.

Compared to its predecessor, BoO has a lighter, less oppressive sound. While the music sounds very much like a desert-Western movie soundtrack, the black metal influences are present in the quivering strings and the piano melodies take the place of extended tone drones. The percussion is slow and emphatic with crashing cymbals but the beats are muted and the cymbals merely sound crisp. The result is no less stark in mood and ambience: the desert sun’s rays beat pitilessly on your head and shoulders and all around you is bare ground with only bleached cattle skeletons lying in the dirt. You know there’s only one thing that’s important, and that’s to find water in this baking heat; everything else, such as why the gangsters dumped you in this hell-hole, fades into insignificance.

The second track is the major piece at just over 10 1/2 minutes and is sludge doom in a cleaner, lighter vein than might be expected. Now guitar feedback drones come to the fore in parts of the track while vibrating bass guitar and funeral march percussion carry the music, pallbearer-style. The third track is not much different from the other two except for the vibrato guitars which start to have a more buzzy hornet texture.

It can be very monotonous and sometimes overwhelming music even though it’s not especially heavy and there are light moments where the music reduces to quiet solo piano, a subdued guitar drone and a strange atmosphere of foreboding. There’s no easy resolution and some time after the album ends, the tension and ominous feeling hang in the air like vultures circling about, waiting for their victim to succumb to dehydration.

In a tiny disc, an entire world of desolation and harsh, unforgiving Nature are contained. You venture there at your peril. If the music were any longer than it is, you would be close to an agonising end. The wonder is that the fellow behind Monument of Urns / Bird of Omen can remain incognito; in spite of creating music with such a narrow range of riffing and melody and a small sound palette, he knows how to hold his audience spellbound by changing emphasis now and again, and by subtle variations in the instrumentation, suggests that there’s far more happening in the music than there is.

October 8, 2013

Ceramic Wrapped In Gold

Various Artists
GoldDust
UK THE SLIGHTLY OFF KILTER LABEL sok042 CD (2012)

The performances documented on this compilation were all recorded in May 2011 at the HOUSE festival in Brighton, and cover an array of modern ‘compositional’ techniques. Attendees – a whopping 16 per evening – donned headphones for each site-specific performance. The sleeve’s recommendation that listeners should do the same ensures that those of us not fortunate enough to have been among that number will experience a realistic sample of the event. Each piece is preceded by a pithy, potted biography of the performer, which means an edited rip of the pieces will be necessary, but it does at least offer a welcome insight into the specifics of the performers; a rare luxury when dealing with music such as this.

Electronic improviser, itinerant sound source enthusiast and SP reviewer, Paul Khimasia Morgan is first up, whose ‘For Uma Devi’ is a low static hiss, textured by manifold metallic rubs and fumbling, exclamation-marked at one point by a snatch of joyous electro-liturgy. From this murky wash emerge disparate audio oddities, microscopic in size, like the sea producing pockets of fizzy microlife. A similar proposition; Interdisciplinary composer and conceptualist Jon Aveyard’s ‘Captive and Comfortable’ portrays the painful, near-mechanical respiration of a yogi’s last stretched gasps, overlaid by a veering cloud-thin veneer of plastic crackling, which thins to a crisp, drawn hiss over its 12 minutes. Alongside Morgan’s, it is one of the CD’s more subdued and inviting mysteries. Sound artist Michalis Mavronas adopts a more menacing posture in ‘Bedroom #1’: dense, a revelation of rolling reverb that belches up all manner of nocturnal alien sea life – a pullulating portrait of high cries and rubbery twitters pummelled by high winds, synth washes, and subaquatic echoes, hitting a captivating fever pitch in its final minutes.

More jarringly, Neil Luck’s ‘Maestro’ intercuts strange daytime TV soundtrack interludes into intonation-free Japanese/English sound poetry, like a soap opera written by James Joyce. Ruminations on choice, colour, curtains and keys are split between (human) speakers, speeds and headphones, which collision provides an agreeably disorientating transition from the quotidian mantras of everyday life. In ‘House’, Marcus Leadley presents a more voyeuristic view of the voice: furtive field recordings of familial fraternising (recorded in the Ceramic House itself) spliced with slices of near-silent inactivity. If the piece doesn’t appear to go anywhere, one might infer an intentional parallel to anticlimactic homecomings, especially as the audible sections appear to have been selected for their very lack of import.

Joseph Young’s domestic soundtrack (and homage to John Cage), ‘In a Kitchen’ collages similar pieces of the picayune, including what sounds like a blissfully lengthy act of micturition at one point. The kitchen sink methodology, from which the piece presumably pulls its title, serves the listener a seamless set of sounds censored from conscious experience. The stentorian tone of the poetry reciter in the background bears shades of Coil’s John Balance, heard from behind a curtain.

Overall, it’s a relaxing and enjoyable survey of communal sound, where even the strange is strikingly ordinary, though the reverse is never quite the case. Perhaps its greatest virtue lies in the ultimate portability of a unique ‘live’ experience once served to the select few.

The Slightly Off Kilter Label

September 6, 2013

See the Colour of Nothingness

Catherine Lamb / Bryan Eubanks
Untitled #12 (After Agnes)
USA SACRED REALISM SR001 CD (2012)

Here, we enter the murky waters where art collides with music. Untitled #12 (After Agnes) is the first release on a new American imprint: Sacred Realism. An apt name for a label that is prepared to release this challenging piece of music. The key to Untitled #12 (After Agnes) is slow development. I mean, glacially slow development. At first listen, it’s a grey, almost featureless wash of buzzing and hums – not a totally inappropriate sonic environment for viewing the painting Untitled #12 by Agnes Martin, here reproduced on the inside of the digipack. The sleevenotes state “this is a realization of a generative work.” Ok, so this is a portion of something a whole lot bigger. I’ve been intrigued by the generative audio/visual work 77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno, which I saw at Fabrica in Brighton in 2010, but this idea of a constantly evolving piece needs a visual element to be truly successful, in my opinion. By simply referencing an existing painting without so much as an explanation even as to why that particular painting was selected, seems disingenuous. All is not lost! The sleevenotes go on to point out “A stand-alone application for OSX can be downloaded at sacredrealism.org/untitled12…” – so that’s Mac users catered for; if you want to run it on a pc you need to involve SuperCollider but Sacred Realism helpfully provide instructions on doing so. So, if you opt to download this application, you then have access to the work as a whole, which I’m sure will dwarf the cd release, but I’m still not sure if or why I should engage with such a big commitment.

Turning, then, to the accompanying press release, (although I presume the information contained in this text would not be available to help someone standing in a record shop – or art gallery shop – deliberating whether to purchase Untitled #12 (After Agnes) or Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain), which states “a starting point for listening to nothing”. In my mind, this statement is key to understanding the work. And, I think, the reason the work exists in the first place. In fact, I think this statement is so important, I’m going to type it out again, for emphasis: “a starting point for listening to nothing”.

Actually, now I’ve had a chance to explore it, the Sacred Realism website does state “this piece is not a ‘”translation” of the painting, but a starting point for listening into nothing.” There. Now I’ve typed it a third time. But this has really hit a nerve with me. Here’s a short, personal anecdote which I think has some relevance: when I was a child I remember I would fall asleep at night trying to “see” the colour of nothingness; of the dark behind my closed eyelids. After around fifteen minutes of hard concentration, this would sometimes produce results; a perception of the “colour” of nothing…

Does Untitled #12 (After Agnes) produce results? Hmmm, I’m not sure. Or rather I’m not sure what the intended results were, or whether the music really satisfied the composers’ brief. With Untitled #12 (After Agnes), we are being invited to hear the sound of nothing; consider the sound of nothing. But, existential concerns apart, why would anyone want to do that?

Depending on your mood, this album is either an unwelcome exercise in reduction or pleasantly womblike. The reality of the situation is an hour of “…tuned white noise and sine tones…”; a kind of machine-drone white noise; a featureless landscape of inoffensive bit-crushed throbbing, which, for insomniacs could be useful.

Ultimately, it is hard to recommend this for close listening as without the employment of very hard concentration or improper use of psychotropic chemicals this record struggles, really, to stand up to repeated listens. You could say that Lamb and Eubanks are pushing the definition of what is music. But this is music you can understand and appreciate as a concept – you don’t have to actually listen to it. Which makes it concept art.

Sacred Realism

September 6, 2013

Monique Jean: Hard Graft for Easy Listening

Monique Jean
Greffes
CANADA empreintes DIGITALes IMED 12119 DVD (2012)

In this tastefully packaged DVD-audio recording, electroacoustic composer (and former Francis Dhomont protégé) Monique Jean (re)asserts her redoubtable talent in a field scarcely short of it. Her second release on the empreintes Digitales label – in 9 years to be precise – demonstrates a depth of realisation most likely achieved as a result of a patient, methodical work ethic. Unlikely is it that she’s been sat around thinking about lunch all these years: her list of works for live performance, radio, video and installations, since 1997, is Babylonian in stature. Regarding the work itself: in the words of a biographer, Jean ‘is interested in the tensions, ruptures and clashes of sonic matter that produce a transmutation of the real into the poetic.’ Which is as valid a summary of the contents of this DVD as one could possibly muster.

The slightly sycophantic sleeve notes twice designate the composer a ‘siren’ (though not ‘a goddess’, phew); moving on to conceptually clarify the kinesthetics of solo instrumental performance qua source material for Jean, relating a methodology whereby ‘each performer’s gesture…is magnified and broken down to its energetic principles, which then become the theme of the piece.’ And where for some this might entail sampling and looping telling fragments of a recording for the sake of a tasty beat, for Jean it is an intuitive reckoning with the musician’s very élan vital, as she disembowels a series of intrepid improvisations and exposes the pulsating innards. While Iancu Dumitrescu isn’t likely to find himself on the dole any time soon, he would have every cause to approve of this assiduously assembled set of acousmatic meditations.

While the album’s title Greffes (‘Grafts’, 2011) alludes to realms botanical, I concur with (sleeve note writer) Sharon Kanach’s ‘amniotic’ designation, for there is palpable depth to her world. Subtle aquatic allusions/illusions emerge from the get-go: alien technology stealthily scanning the primordial sea floor in ‘Givre’, begetting an unearthly counterpart to Parmegiani’s La Creation du Monde; while simultaneously inhabiting a measureless void – space both inner and outer – a blackness sliced by shafts of light, devoid of emotion or intellect; over 17 minutes accreting electromagnetic mass in the face of the inexorable final moment. Something of a centrepiece to the album, this piece might benefit frequenters of flotation tanks more than the usual phalanx of reverbed panpipes and didgeridoos.

In ‘Ricochets’ (2006), a soaring saxophone shrieks, wails, wavers and vomits its guts into the alchemist’s laboratory, where it is both dissected and disintegrated on a bed of silence which becomes a funeral pyre: the incandescence of the performance immolating the improviser, who issues upwards in a pungent plume of smoke. Within this, identity remains intact if intangible; conveyed in millions of glistening particles that flow freely from the expanding flames, rattling and retreating from the speakers in intervals.

Similar phenomena beset subsequent performances; differences determined by participants’ personalities. These are also electronically processed, abstracted and distilled. ‘Misfit’ (2007) sees a tightly tuned guitar given the Catholic heat treatment: the rising and abating conflagration discharging the essence of the once-electric instrument into the heavens. Its strings become livid tendrils that lash through the dense smoke, leaving bloody trails. In ‘low memory #3’ (2005) and #1 (2000) there is a distinct alternation/altercation between extended bouts of atmospheric compression and decompression, ‘attempts at re-establishing some kind of balance…the act of rebuilding being constantly thwarted and repeated’; clarinets of different pitches are manipulated and molested with religious fervour and scientific rigour, as though concealing a cosmic secret from the inquisition.

There is violence apparent in these audio autopsies, though it is as implied in the recorded performance as it is, applied by the curious composer. The result is an agonising catharsis, whereby the transpersonal essence is alchemically separated from the ‘corpse’ of the recording and given freedom of speech, within the full emancipatory remit of the recorded medium. It’s a real room-rumbler to boot. Jean’s concerts have won her acclaim in Canada (she took home the 2005 Opus Award for Concert of the Year), which suggests her performances must be something approaching transcendental, if this sublime, surround-sound extravaganza serves as an indication of her prowess. In rare instances such as this recording, a voice speaks to me from an alien dimension, whereupon I experience a gut-level glimmering of fear and wonder. For those who regard the recorded medium as a tomb for ‘dead’ performances, this album might revive a few spirits. Seek it out forthwith!

September 1, 2013

Meirino Blanket

Francisco Meirino
Untitled Phenomenas In Concrete
AUSTRIA CAVE12 C12O03 CD (2012)

The information about Francisco Meirino I’ve come across online states; “active since 1994 (as phroq until 2009) in sound and live performance, he explores the tension between programmable material and the potential for its failure by working mainly with the computer, magnetic fields detectors, reel-to-reel tape recorders, piezo transducers and various acoustic devices…” So Untitled Phenomenas In Concrete is quite a departure.

It is a composition for UPIC and field recordings (“…recordings of snow falling, bones cracking, magnetic fields and insects”), assembled and mastered by Meirino between 2008 and 2012. The press release tells us “UPIC is a computerised musical composition tool, devised by the composer Iannis Xenakis. It consists of a digitising tablet linked to a computer, which has a vector display.” No doubt there will be an app for your phone that does that soon.

Untitled Phenomenas In Concrete commences with a noise that sounds like an electrical substation being switched on – it happens a second time at 10 minutes 15 and again around 27 and a half minutes after a minute or so of silence. This is an extremely loud and physical noise which made me feel like I was getting defibrillated by means of a strong electric charge. Not quite what I was expecting as I settled down to listen to this disc for the first time with a glass of wine after a long day, but exciting, nonetheless.

Untitled Phenomenas In Concrete certainly runs the gamut of sounds possible with UPIC. Other electronicists fortunate enough to be able to use the system produce, at least to my ears, quite similar sounding work in terms of sounds rather than composition; Russell Haswell, for example… ¹

The piece begins with a series of ragged encrypted data files shorn of all rough edges angrily, by plastic surform; bought from Wickes, until they once again come to resemble the real-life sounds they were possibly sourced from. Meirino then delves into pseudo academic software composer sounds, like if Stockhausen had designed Korg’s recent fevered re-imagining of the MS20 monosynth; to put it in layman’s terms, then: avant-garde fizzing noises. Then there’s a passage around 24 mins where Meirino lets loose a subtle theme that puts me in mind of Mogwai’s repeating motif for their soundtrack to the French television series Les Revenants, (screened under the title The Returned on Channel 4). There follows a tranche of abrupt and violent noises which put me in mind of those bygone days when fiddling around with synthesiser patches meant playing around with actual voltage and not simply prodding a cursor disinterestedly around a computer screen. This is music that wants to be thought of as shudderingly new and contemporary and yet it still manages to sound not unlike Stockhausen’s Telemusik or Kontakte – pieces that were recorded nearly fifty years ago.

Ultimately, UPIC is a visual control surface, and as such, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that the drawings made by the operator are as important as the resultant music. Happily, the sleeve of Untitled Phenomenas In Concrete features three examples (00’00” – 07’21”) of Meirino’s draughtsmanship used on the UPIC system to produce Untitled Phenomenas In Concrete, plus an inserted folded A3 poster printed, white on black, with the remaining drawings that make up the composition, (07’21” – 34’17”). This is a welcome addition and goes some way to help the listener properly appreciate the composition. The press release points out that Meirino “…spent nearly four years composing/drawing line by line…listening to every line, gradually adding on lines and sounds, erasing, reassembling…”

A nice package – a gatefold card sleeve with a wraparound sticker applied to it holding all the black and white printed visual information; you have to carefully slit the sticker on one edge to access the disc and poster.

Franciso Meirino
CAVE12

[Editor's note: of course there is no such word as "Phenomenas". The plural of Phenomenon is Phenomena, so the addition of the plural "s" is redundant. Meirino's computer compositional skills are not in question, but he doesn't know his Greek!]

See this post for Haswell and Hecker’s work with GenDyn. ↩

August 19, 2013

Articulations

International SoundArtFestival
Playing with Words: Live
GRUENREKORDER GRUEN 083 DVD (2010)

This DVD is a video document of the live sound art and spoken word festival ‘Playing with Words’ that took place at the Gallus Theater, Frankfurt on May 21st, 2009. The festival was part of collaboration between Kulturnetz Frankfurt and CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Art Practice) at the London College of Communication, a project that also yielded the anthology Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice edited by Cathy Lane. Having generated some positive reviews, the anthology looks set to become a key work in its field. It brings together some useful texts by complimentary practioners who are rarely collated within such a cohesive frame. Although not as comprehensive due to the obvious restrictions of the event, Playing with Words: Live is just as valuable as the anthology particularly because it dispenses with theory and presents practice: sound art offered and understood as an act of performance.

Shot by Bernhard Bauser, the DVD features footage of each of the 6 international participants: Nye Parry, Sianed Jones, Ansuman Biswas, Jaap Blonk, Jörg Piringer and Dirk Huelstrunk. Although ‘sound art’ is a broad church this was not an evening of ‘tablecore’, noise or electronic music despite the use of digital technology and various forms of manipulating amplification. The focus in each case was on the range, potentialities and extremities of the human voice. Each artist took the voice (their own, and in the case of Nye, that of his friend Gordon McPherson) as their primary instrument and the performances set about deconstructing its abilities as a generator of sound.

This obsessively sonic remit along with the bare theatre setting begs the question why go to the trouble of releasing a DVD at all? Surely this could have been better served as a CD to parallel the book?

Well, no actually. What the DVD shows is importance of the visual information in the understanding of the performative and material aspect of sound art. For instance, whilst Blonk creates extraordinary sounds the key to understanding his piece lies not in trying to translate or decode that which is heard. Instead the significance is connected to the way he tugs and pulls on his throat and face to actually produce his sounds. His voice is used as an incorporated instrument, one that projects itself out into the air but is at the same time embodied within the architecture of the larynx and mouth. Much the same can be said of Biswas and Huelstrunk. They both start with breathing techniques and short grunts which build into contorted, seemingly glossolalic articulations. Biswas’s is the more conceptually defined of the two performances, taking the form of a fractured, self- conscious lecture that struggles to bridge theory and practice. In both cases though, it’s essential to see the actual manipulation of the voice in order to get a sense of it as a corporeal entity.

There’s a different but no less important emphasis on visual meaning in Piringer’s piece, the first one on the DVD. The performance involves the repetition of individual letters which are gradually accumulated into a modulating drone. This is also played out alongside a projection screen that shows similar letters spread out, colliding and overlapping. His vocal work with the phoneme is thus reflected in the spectacular pile-up of corresponding graphemes. There’s the obvious influence of concrete poetry here (Ernst Jandl comes to mind) but what’s distinctive is the animated nature of the projections. This permits typescript, that which is usually spatially determined, to be included into the temporality of the vocal performance as it moves up, down and across the screen.

In the case of Parry and Jones, the visual impact of their performances comes with their use of self-accompaniment. Nye works with a disassembled answer phone message broadcast via a portable stereo and Jones uses a violin during her extended vocal performance. These instruments initially work as support to the voices of Nye and Jones but they are gradually integrated into the looping structure of the performances themselves, suggesting a wider interest in echo, feedback and dialogue.

Playing with Words was obviously a fascinating event. The DVD is a slightly riskier prospect because these things can so easily become souvenirs: interesting only if you happen to have been there. What redeems this document is the consistency of the performers. As sound artists they’re working with very different methodologies but seeing them together in succession brings out their collective rationale. There’s clearly a reason why they should be on stage together and that’s the reason why you should watch this.

Gruenrekorder

August 11, 2013

The World in a Grain of Sound

Kristin Norderval
Aural Histories
USA DEEP LISTENING INSTITUTE DL 45-21012 CD (2012)

The simplest things are sometimes the most difficult to master. Breathing for instance. Try counting 50 breaths without thinking of a football score, or coordinating breath with complicated body movements. Try slowing down to 10 second breathing ratios. Try vocalising as you inhale as well as exhale. Not so easy, unless you are one Kristin Norderval. her ‘stories without lyrics’, compiled in this CD cover more than a decade of focused experimentation with the breath and the vibrations it carries. The selection of 10 ‘post-ambient arias’ ranges from vocal-based to purely electronic, the subtlety and intricacy of which better merit a listen than a write up. Several were in fact composed for dance performances, though how something often resembling laptop musique concrète translates into kinaesthetic action is something of an enigma.

Three of the pieces (‘A Flat Ground’,’ A Summons’ and ‘Circadian Singing’) utilise a single-take improvisation as their sound source, though the post-recording work was presumably quite intensive. The first (recorded 2001) – a decade the junior – is the most involved, its echoing, Seurat-like layers of sedated sighs summon up Bjork’s Medulla’s thick, moonlit seascapes, traversed by Tim Buckley’s Starsailor. It would sound comfortably at home on David Toop’s superlative compilation, Crooning on Venus. The latter pieces are more subdued and spacious; the singer’s early predilection for more detailed tonal textures sublimated into more isolated venues for fricative trills and gasps, and inhalation/exhalation enunciation.

Elsewhere, the voice is supplanted by machine as the primary sound source: coffee makers, microwaves, incubators, antique motors and Mexican radio among them; all are processed and incorporated into a finely-spun whir that frequently intrudes on the foreground figure(s). In ‘Glass and Mirrors’ for example, Norderval’s dream world appears to have been permeated by Annea Lockwood’s glassy, glacial resonance – its amorphous tendrils grasping intangibly at her liquid lyricism. Inspirations, another of Norderval’s ‘meditations on breath’ evokes a riverboat diva forever adrift on a Moebius strip of water, her suspended soprano register punctured and thwarted by fragments of cottoned brass; vexed by the seeming endlessness of the mechanical dreamscape.

August 2, 2013

From a ‘Why?’ to a Whisper

Murmer
Framework 1-4
HERBAL INTERNATIONAL CONCRETE DISK 1103-2 2 x CD (2012)

Adopting a different tack to so many other field recordings that ‘put you there’, Murmer’s Frameworks first takes a ‘postmodern’ (note the inverted commas) turn by questioning why such motives exist. The notes that accompany this set of lengthy ‘experiments’ draw explicit attention to a) the variety of self-imposed creative ‘limits’ applied to each recording and b) the limitations in any recording ‘artist’s’ claims to objectivity. One sentiment presumably feeds into the other.

The first point is most evident in the first of the eponymous ‘Frameworks’ ([Paris Cuts]), with its minidisc provenance and linear editing. Here ‘experiment’ connotes a command of commitment from the listener during 14-odd minutes of sweat-browed concentration, sounding like the contents of a Dictaphone that’s been left recording in someone’s pocket during the delivery of a truckload of rattling scaffolding. Felt my bones rattle. The second Framework – insulated from the first by a peaceful interlude – is a differently jarring experience – a 33 minute odyssey of resonant locations (or locational resonances), from sports stadium chants to a tornado of insect whirring; an approaching storm to the aural brutality of an ear pressed close to a wall being drilled. The structure is juxtaposition sans segue, which is as intriguing as it is unsettling. In these situations it becomes difficult to trust one’s first response to so eclectic an assortment, which is why benefit of doubt was invoked and rewarded in the second half.

Relief arrives with the onset of multi-layering in ‘Framework 3 [Swarm]’ – the second ‘radio work’, which ‘includes sounds produced by a group of workshop participants in an attempt to actively resonate and interact with a specific space’; the point being to ‘call into question (the) recordist’s position as a passive spectator’.

Whether or not this should be evident to a layman like myself I know not. I prefer to regard the transition as the conscious evolution of the structure of the earlier pieces into something more organic and immersive. Strange sounds melt imperceptibly into one another while attention is buoyed upon viscous vapours; the eruption of a molten choir in the latter half of the piece is evocative of a sea of lost voices clamouring resignedly for the rare ear that can perceive them. The warp into the endless insect nocturne of the final Framework – which thematically parallels the more agitated heart of the second – is a judicious bit of navigation.

Doubtless, locational recording does necessitate a significant amount of artistic and technical subjectivity, and in light of this consideration – for better or worse – Framework 1-4 constitutes ‘experimental’ music of an authentic variety. Its incrementally organic tendency however – if only ostensibly – bears strong testament to the evolution of the attitude that informed the presentation of the recordings and thus arrives at something perfectly palatable. It’s quite a journey indeed.

July 29, 2013

A Fitful Impasse

Monica Brooks & Laura Altman
As Is
AUSTRALIA IT’LL BE AWESOME 002 CDR (2012)

Curious CD from Sydney. Very spartanly presented, very spartanly instrumented. Our two antipodean artistes utilise on this recording accordion and clarinet, respectively. Both make tentative enquiries in the higher registers of both instruments and use extraneous and ephemeral effects of non-standard physical sound generation, what is known as “extended technique”. The extended technique is not extended much further than these quiet high frequency forays, however; restraint, or hesitancy, is the order of the day.

The restrained and reduced instrumental approach might ordinarily be an encouragement to deep listening, go deep here and you find yourself contemplating mass transit systems, airport terminals, the undersides of caterpillar treads. Potentially uncomfortable places to rest for any length of time. These intimated locations remind me of certain scenes in Patrick Keiller’s films: long, static shots presented in a documentary manner of localised manifestations of global capital such as highly automated ports and out of town shopping centres. Places often edited out of existence (understandably) by the psychic censor.

The title As Is suggests that this disc is conceived of as a verité document, the results of an experiment presented for inspection. Extrapolated, perhaps it is the situation of two artists negotiating their wider real-world context. We hear the dry sounds of a fragmentary indoor busking, unwilling to be heard, the two wind instruments doing a fair impression of the slow squeak of metal grates against the distant backdrop of diesel generators and diggers reversing. The specific (muted) urban-industrial backdrop that is sharing the acoustic space is throughout a tonally confusing monotone alongside the (spare) musical information. Subdued shadings in chalk and charcoal on concrete walls, faint luminescence of contradiction.

Apparently As Is was recorded in a ‘concrete room’ in a former brewery in the middle of multiple construction sites; the low growling grey concrete dust of the metropolis is a constant throughout all tracks. Despite being enclosed within a building, the low-frequency sounds of mechanised urban activity still manage to seep in, subtly crowding the acoustic space. In between silences, underneath quiet sustained high register pitches, the muffled rumble of activity sits discomfitingly under what might in another context become delicate interplay.

However rather than interplay, the two distinct aural elements come across as mutual incompatibility, a contrast highlighting an underlying tension or even antagonism (at least in the configurations attempted) – there may be more specific dialectical implications to be teased out here by those with the inclination. The only time that the artists seem to compete with the background noises of the playing environment is when they move briefly towards the lower register or make more definite gestures. In the third track, ‘In distinction’ (a telling title?), the tonal spectrum broadens to include lower instrumentally-generated pitches and more movement. This indicates a way out of what can seem a fitful impasse. It turns out to be only a brief moment. Perhaps the artistic decision was to throw such brief moments into relief by surrounding them with determinedly introverted and self-effacing playing?

Much of the rest of the album involves tones which are dissatisfied with their own audibility, which seem quite happy and relieved for a reprieve from the task of making a sound when a passing delivery van or dropped pen takes centre stage. In some ways this can be confusing, certainly leading to an unsatisfying listening experience, in others it perhaps contains something of the Taoist approach to confrontation, making a virtue of weakness.

The uncomfortable contrast between the tentative, de-centred, lop-sided approach of the duo and the noisy construction activity occurring in the same soundfield induces a mindset in which speculations on the relationship between the personal and industrial, entertainment, art, commerce and capital occur and within such a framework demonstrates two peoples’ own oblique strategy when confronting such questions. Rather a dry subject when framed and limited in this way. Still, although in some ways frustrating, there is food for certain modes of thought here, if not much for the ears or the more exuberant areas of the psyche.

What we can say definitely, concretely, at the end of this is that this is ‘as was’, these sounds were performed in this particular situation. Reasons and results remain notionally obscure, coloured by a murky wash of exhaust particles. This very obscurity of hidden purpose may hold a key to understanding, though. The plain presentation, lack of adornment or transformation is the essential nature of the artefact. Not seeking to construct an imaginationally transfigured situation it invites us instead to contemplate the implications and nature of a specific real-world nexus of different human activities.