A lot of the physical sciences being demonstrated here are beyond my limited intellectual reach, but Zapparoli knows exactly what she’s doing and describes the entire point of the performance in concise matter-of-fact terms. For my part, I like the idea that she might be revealing “invisible forces”, and is attempting to present a “new experience of space, time, and human scale”. I’m reminded to some extent of the work of Disinformation in the 1990s, another sound artist who grasped at any VLF sound he could manage to capture in tangible form, building up his glimpses of an otherwise imperceptible world around us.

Marta Zapparoli is no mere process artist though, and on this release she’s working on building a bridge between the natural world and the technological one, with very credible results. (11/12/2023)

Yes, it’s a field recording type-genre release but mixed with music and such, and both sides amount to a diverting semi-cinematic styled sweep of an odd imaginary landscape, almost telling stories. On ‘GW954f’, Nils Mosh makes a collage out of wolf howls and interviews, so plenty spoken word here creating a documentary vibe. He did it in the Ruhr area, where there are traces of mining, but also pasture, villages, sand pits…he found clumps of wolf fur on the barbed wire, he saw traces of digging in the earth, he spoke to local people, shepherds, farmers, and conservationists. More than once, he said to himself “to think I only came here to record the song of a nightingale” (true fact), and found himself staying there for three years, immersing himself in the lore of the wolf. From what I can gather, the wolf is a pretty “hot topic” in this part of the world, and I suppose he encountered and recorded many divergent points of view. Nature-lovers evidently want to protect wildlife, but I’m not sure if the shepherds take the diametrically opposite view; I would hope that it’s not quite as polarised, or as physical, as the vexed issue of fox hunting in the UK countryside, over which many an idealist has come to blows.

Nils Mosh has turned in a compelling sound document; though the dialogue is all in German, I’d still like to think it’s a balanced and nuanced presentation of the arguments (unlike the binary “join me or die” sentiment that continues to prevail on social media), and what’s more it amounts to a nifty, subtle piece of audio poetry.

Likewise with Melissa Pons – her side is titled ‘Lament of the Wolf’ and blends the phonography tapes with musical interludes. She might not have spent three years in her chosen residency, but she did pass several days at a wolf refuge – the Iberian Wolf Recovery Centre. After learning this particular animal is suffering from a massive population reduction (it might even be an endangered species), she totally “went native” and pretty much ran with the wolves – learned the names of a dozen of these canines, and absorbed much lore and knowledge from the staff at the Centre. She got into a “rhythm” – the rhythm of the animals, and before long she was even dreaming about them, thinking her way back into the form of an innocent child who could bond with these beasts. In all this, Pons demonstrates considerable empathy with this branch of the animal kingdom, which allows her to re-examine ancient European myths about the wolf; Christian tradition tended to see the animal as the Devil incarnate, and hunted it for no other reason than an attempt to drive out evil. Her simpatico work – also a beautiful listen – may be a step on the way to the rehabilitation of the wolf.

In all, an understated listen perhaps, but quite stunning results by the end of it, and breathing a puff of new life into the field recording genre. By the way, it’s pressed on that recycled / reclaimed vinyl we’ve been hearing so much about, so it’s probably better for the environment too. From 7th July 2023.

The story of it is that their apartment house in Berlin underwent renovation in 2012. For two years, they suffered the agony of building works which I’m sure are familiar to many readers; the artists say “we were forced to inhabit this estranged place that used to be our apartment”. During this time, their lives changed – they couldn’t look out of the window or sit on the balcony, dust fell on their heads, bricks fell on their possessions and broke them, and above all there was the continual noise of drilling, hammering, and sawing. “A hostile but fascinating atmosphere,” is how they describe it. It’s this experience they have now made into art. Needless to say, they recorded all the sounds they could as they sat tightly shuttered inside their rooms, and started to perceive these sounds as some form of infernal life going on around them.

Those on-site recordings are now presented here on the vinyl record, although they’ve been I think condensed, mixed, and arranged in some way; at any rate it’s combined with any sounds produced by the installation artwork which they subsequently made, and exhibited in Ausland in Berlin in 2018. For that, they gathered a huge number of old window sashes which they picked up off the streets of Prenzlauer Berg, and assembled them into a sculpture piece, along with angle brackets and lampshades. This was equipped with speakers, amplifiers, “sound exciters”, and waveplayers, so presumably visitors to the installation would provide additional sounds as they entered its rather unusual and disorienting space (which at first glance seems to me like a compacted version of the demonic house in the movie 13 Ghosts). Numerous photos are provided with the release, in the form of full-colour art prints, so you can get the general idea.

As you may have guessed by now, there’s a critical dimension to the work; it’s not just complaining about their own treatment at the hands of their landlord and his “shifty” lawyer, but observing a general trend across Berlin, i.e. greedy real estate developers buying up properties, and renovating them in order to generate more income streams, exploiting our general need for a place to live. Our artistic duo evidently regret the loss and wastage of “vintage construction materials” within this unstoppable process, which is why they’re singled out these charming window sash constructions and building ornaments, now artefacts from a lost time when perhaps builders took a certain pride in their work and affordable quality housing was once a basic standard. All of this could be taken as a critique of one aspect of late capitalism; it’s a monster that is capable of devouring and destroying the past, even as it replaces everything with products of inferior quality, and causes much disruption in the process. It all resonates with me, as all of 2023 has seen me suffering through a similar disruptive and unwanted “renovation” to my own property, carried out with the sole purpose of bringing in more rent money for the landlord.

Besides the underlying “message” to the work, which to their credit the creators don’t belabour or overstate, this is a very rich and rewarding piece in the genre of site-specific field recording, greatly enhanced by the decision to condense it into a very listenable and fascinating record. It’s full of events, to put it mildly; besides the drilling and hammering, the handy shopping-list printed here indicates there were also blow-torches, gas-heaters, falling plaster, wind, the plastic scaffolding cover, general tremors…and, with some relief, the final dismantling of the scaffolding. As you listen you’ll find yourself pulled into a semi-impossible space, where time has been compressed and events layered on top of each other. It’s not just documentary sound; you get the feeling the creators have poured their entire two-year experience (unpleasant as it must have been) into the work, and managed to sublimate it very successfully.

With lacquer cut by Kassian Troyer and mastering at D&M, this is a beautifully presented and fully-integrated work of art. Recommended. From 6th April 2022.

First track is ‘De La Dilatation Du Paysage’, a 2006 collaboration with the painter and ceramicist Michaële-Andréa Schatt. It’s set in an art gallery (the Isabelle Gounod gallery), with speakers mounted on the walls playing back lists of words to the onlookers. An elaborate installation; the idea is that the words somehow create a “dialogue” with the paintings of Michaële-Andréa Schatt. The creators invest a lot of weight in these word-lists, intending them to carry meanings of history, theory, poetry, and technical design, to further the artistic contemplation of space, landscape, and garden. Schatt’s paintings don’t feature too heavily in the booklet; now that I look at her website, I find her landscapes and garden paintings are certainly colourful and lively, but also rather prosaic. There’s a slight tension between the loose sketchy paintings and the very precise word-art that’s going on here, but there’s also a certain poetry in the combined sound-effects (the use of rainfall is especially nice). The word-lists also have a certain resonance, even when translated from French into English; e.g. “Rustling Tessitura Linking Folding Creasing Beating”.

Secondly, we have ‘Double Exposition’, a work dated 2010 in which La Casa teams up with Seijiro Murayama. Famed Japanese drummer and improviser, Murayama’s work has appeared numerous times in these pages, I think most recently on Yan Jun’s elegant Postcards cassette. I see these two collaborated before on Supersedure for the Hibari Music label. This is another piece that’s very tied to the location where it’s made, in this case the Musee Zadkine in Paris; and once again the garden has an important role to play, The creators feel the garden space of this locale has been somewhat overlooked, a passageway on the way to other parts of the museum; so the plan is to emphasize the centrality of this space. In this way they hope to build a sonic replica of the entire museum, and confound the differences between inside and outside. It’s realised with a combination of instruments, percussion, voices, and microphones, and includes comments from visitors and onlookers woven into the very discreet mix. The editing has been executed with La Casa’s typical craft and attention to detail, with an ear very attuned to timbral differences. Fans of Murayama’s percussion work may feel slightly short-changed by these minimal beats and metallic scrapes, but let me tell you when he does play, he sure hits the right note.

Track three is the most sonically rich set on the disc and certainly delivers when it comes to drama and tension, almost a mini radio-drama in 19:59 mins. It also has the most elaborate title, ‘Tentative d’Épuisement (Sonore) d’Un Lieu’. Dating from 2016, the partner here is Arnau Horta, a fellow based at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. He is involved with sound art, but mostly from an analytical standpoint; his credentials place him as a teacher, critic, curator, and philosopher. The duo have set themselves a challenging task, an attempt to recreate the spirit of George Perec, who published a book in 1975 which recollected a catalogue of not-especially-interesting events around a small part of that famed city (Place Saint-Sulpice). I have never read a word of Perec, but admire the idea of someone prepared to document all these fleeting impressions of the quotidien in such exhaustive detail. It strikes me as sitting somewhere between Proust and Guy Debord. Naturally, great French intellectual that he was, he came up with a special word for it – “infraordinary“. La Casa and Horta both have their own sets of reasons for executing this work, and in their brief notes they also mention some of the challenges; “is that even possible?” exclaims the Spaniard, in a moment of exasperation. Possible or not, they have elected to try it, and the results are just fabulous. I love the kaleidoscopic effect of all this aural information colliding in unexpected ways, and compared to the other gallery-based pieces it’s a more all-encompassing vision, bordering on something as impossible as an M.C. Escher engraving. Without question, we can also align it with La Casa’s Paris Quotidien project, released in 2017.

Lastly we have ‘Surface-témoin’ with Jean-Luc Guionnet, dated 2005. I had no idea these two have a history of working together, but they have been making collaborative records since 2002 and would seem to be ideally suited for each other. Guionnet’s recent very bold pieces have been very exciting in the way they make use of unusual interior spaces, sometimes for music performance as well as field recordings. This particular piece has been carried out with the rigour of a research project, and there’s even a protocole de création printed here which details the four steps in its realisation. A particular location is involved, and the work involved interviewing people to answer written questions about the building; their voices have ended up on the record. From here the investigation into the building grows more precise and exploratory, concerned with such things as dimensions, numbers, dates, and other measurable quantities. Then the materials – including both the building and the voices of the people themselves – are subjected to a scientific analysis, by an architect, a sound engineer, and a linguist. Finally, this accumulated data is used to build the compositional work, all founded on the basis of a sine wave tone with a harmonic structure (evidently it’s possible to express this in numbers) which exactly corresponds to the width of the building’s entrance. What’s relevant here, I think, is that we have a composition / installation that is very precisely aligned with its subject matter / location, and the means of its realisation; through it, La Casa and Guionnet hope to arrive at an integrated statement that brings together their interests in space, architecture, and sound art, while asking questions about the “meaning” of an entrance. They also like the idea of a threshold, a place that is half-inside, half-outside, a passage to something else; indeed that particular theme is answered and echoed by the other tracks on this compilation. 21:22 mins of layered and complex sound is the result, surprisingly approachable and transparent considering the multiple ideas and intensive hours of effort involved in its creation; if I’m reading it right, it’s about three days of on-site effort compressed into a single work of sound art.

From 2nd January 2020.

They have developed a unique approach to sound art, with their “Tentacle” devices – these are simply fibreglass rods which allow them to rub up against walls and surfaces in the environment around them. This enables them to “extract” sound in some way. The process is summed up in the subtitle of the record, Tentacles In Sicily – Scratching The Surface which indicates where they did it and refers directly to the “scratching” action. The rods, or canes, are extendable; and the creators are persuaded that the tentacles have become extensions of their own arms, or hands, using them like prosthetic limbs to explore the world. They did it before on the 2016 release Tentacles (Gruen 170) for this same label, which visited parts of Germany, France and The Netherlands. Today’s record presents 11 short instances of these tentacle experiments, and the locations are documented quite meticulously in the accompanying full-colour booklet, in the form of photographs (a camera indeed forms a large part of the set-up) and prose descriptions.

I think the linking factor between all these places in Sicily is that they are abandoned; their notes describe them as “contemporary ruins”. The sounds we hear on this CD may not represent the totality of their endeavour; the full experience, I think, is that sounds are presented as live streams, or broadcasts, or played back over speakers in sound installations in galleries, and that they undergo further changes to acquire what are called “audiokinetic” qualities. We do sometimes pick up background noises (e.g. waves from the seashore, traffic sound on a nearby road), but it’s the scratching and rubbing which dominates this CD. I’ve given this record a couple of spins now, but I keep coming up empty; it just seems inert, uneventful, mere process noise. The recordings don’t seem specific enough to me, and fail to tell us anything meaningful about the built environment. Although the actual locations are clearly quite different in terms of their intended original use – for instance factory, store, retail area, chapel – all the recordings appear to be near-identical. I appreciate that these are “subtle experiences that require attentive listening”, but in return for our attention I think we’re entitled to expect a little more from the outputs.

This isn’t to deny that Prehn and Meyer have evidently spent a good deal of time researching and choosing their intended locations. The prospect of exploring an urban wasteland, these “apocalyptic souvenirs of humans’ attempts to form landscapes” as Ennio Pellicano has it in his annotation, is an exciting one; but the artists somewhere fail to meet the challenge, can’t get us much closer to the truth of a building, and don’t convey anything remotely “apocalyptic”, apart from a rather dreary sense of desolation and emptiness. Far from extending our human senses and apprehensions, as is hoped, these fibreglass tentacles tend to have a deadening effect, both on us as listener, and on the artists themselves, who seem to be perceiving the world at one step removed as they tentatively explore and rub against the walls through these prophylactics. For a more worthwhile artistic take on the modern problem of abandoned buildings, see the Torba record from 2019 and the Italian video project that inspired it. From 15th December 2020.

Seidl is a German composer who’s a member of the Stock11 art group and the electronic duo dis.playce, and his work has appeared on many European stages. Kötter is described here as a “media artist”, but I find elsewhere that he’s worked in films and music direction, and borrowed from experimental cinema to realise his aims. For Stadt, they’re joined by three other musicians – Sebastian Berweck (pianist interested in electronic music), Martin Lorenz (percussionist with interest in music theatre), and Andrea Neumann, the famed performer of the Berlin “reduced playing” school and member of Phosphor. These three are presumably providing the low-key but texturally rich abstracto-electronica noise in the near background, that helps make this such a compelling listen. The other main contributor is Christina Kubisch, a topnotch sound artist who we’ve heard before on this same label, often with her collaborator Eckehard Güther. Their Unter Grund record was a detailed and well-researched examination of the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex in Essen, and her sense of engagement with the environment makes her a highly suitable candidate to appear on today’s record.

Stadt [Land Fluss] is less site-specific than that, and is intended I think to be read as a general observation about the condition of “the city” in the 21st century. Everything is in a state of change, bulldozers tear down buildings, modifications and renovations wherever you look; what effect will these changes have? If this is a battle for the soul of the city, who will emerge victorious? What will the future be like? These poignant questions inform the “discourse” of this radio play, expressed mostly through spoken word and electronic sound. The speeches – many of them in English – may have been excerpted from interviews about town planning and the current state of society. I kept looking for contextual information, but the sources aren’t given here. There are also some location recordings and documentary sounds taken from urban areas, but these are (perhaps surprisingly) used very sparingly, and don’t seem to be proving a specific point so much as adding to the general atmosphere of the piece.

In short, Stadt [Land Fluss] is shaping up to be an art-statement, a vague and generalised impression of urban renewal, and one where direct social or political comment is kept at arm’s length. Even the cover art is anonymous; it creates the impression of a very schematic street map, or some sort of specialist measuring grid used by architects, but really it’s just straight lines and numbers. You can derive quite a different impression from reading the booklet’s script, which is laced with many trenchant comments about the subject, ranging from practical and factual statements to more politically-infused and philosophical musings. But it’s not clear who these speakers are, what the situation is, what problems they’re addressing, or when they said it. It’s this that reinforces my impression that Stadt [Land Fluss] is a slightly unfocussed survey of the subject, but this shouldn’t be taken as a negative, and besides being a very interesting listen, it may be making its points in more subtle and oblique ways. From 15th December 2020.

Luciane Cardassi is a native of Brazil living in Banff (Alberta) just now, and is known as a skilled interpreter of new music on her piano. For her latest ongoing project Going North, she’s working with modern classical composers from Brazil and from Canada, and presenting the results on the Ramos album and on today’s item Going North (REDSHIFT RECORDS TK480). The eight items showcased here are very recent – the earliest was composed in 2008 – and they also feature some electronic parts along with the piano, and many of them also require voices, either pre-recorded on tapes or supplied by Cardassi herself. Luciane Cardassi has taken it on herself to act as “curator” for a lot of these works which are otherwise in danger of being regarded as somewhat marginal, and she makes her choices with care and deliberation. It’s also to her credit that these difficult pieces of music require her to stretch her capabilities; the cover photo may suggest a woman who’s very eager to please an audience, but the music here is quite some way from being accessible or populist. (29/09/2020)

The record 14.11.90 – Ein Akustisches Psychogramm (KARLRECORDS KR082) was originally released in 1993 and created by the duo of Marc Weiser and Jurgen Hendlmeier in Berlin. They released it as a limited-run vinyl LP on the Geldrausch Tonträger label, founded for this very purpose (matter of fact, nothing else was released under that imprint) and today’s item is a re-release undertaken by the good people at Karl Records. In 1990, a number of squats in East Berlin (in Mainzer Straße in Berlin-Friedrichshain, to be exact) were raided by the police, and 500 anarchist types were evicted; Weiser and Hendlmeier witnessed this happening, and were evidently moved enough to make this imaginative and unusual audio response to the situation. They did it using documentary recordings of the clashes on the street – it was quite an affair, involving a lot of police officers, helicopters, water cannons and such – along with samples, snippets of music, and segments lifted from television or radio. The aim has been to build something more than just a simple documentary / field recording piece, and they wanted to capture something of the violence of the occasion, and present the events in a highly dramatic manner. The press notes call this a “densely packed acoustic psychogram”, a handy little phrase suggesting their intention to tap into the unfettered psychic energies of the anarchists, and apparently the method used may be compared to a piece by Einsturzende Neubaten. All of this may mean more to a German audience; I do understand the interest in the political dimension of this highly-charged clash between the forces of law and order and those of anarchy, but the creators don’t succeed in conveying why it matters so much. There’s also a lack of context; even I know the Berlin wall had just collapsed one year before this time, an event which might have had some bearing on the situation, plus there’s a rich history of NDW music in the 1980s that itself was largely enabled by the squat scene and cheap housing in East Berlin. Neither of these strands are even mentioned on the record, but perhaps we’re just supposed to take them as given. Intriguing and unusual record though, and its disconnected and haphazard feeling adds to the general vibe of chaos. (/08/09/2020)

Lively instrumental music from the Berlin trio Insomnia Brass Band on their album Late Night Kitchen (TIGER MOON RECORDS TMR 009). The instrumentation is a tad unusual – trombone (Anke Lucks), baritone sax (Almut Schlichting), and drums (Christian Marien) – leading one to think for five mins that we might be getting a straight-ahead jazz offering, but the intention of these three players is much more broad-minded, and they incorporate musical ideas lifted from free jazz, punk rock, funk, and even (they claim) New Orleans trad. Upending the audience expectations seems to be one of things on this label’s agenda – witness for instance the records by Absolutely Sweet Marie (strange cover versions of Bob Dylan songs) and Tru Cargo Service, which layered many unexpected ideas and directions within the context of music that looked jazz-ish on the surface. Insomnia Brass Band are aiming to be a lot more accessible than those though, and the upbeat mood and jaunty tone throughout this album might not exactly make it a “party” record, but they’re certainly in search of a good time. At times, they get close to the “dark cabaret” style that would be suitable for playing Kurt Weill’s music on Die Dreigroschenoper, and this links them back to antecedents such as Willem Breuker’s records of the 1970s. This jolly spirit is borne out by the slightly playful track titles – such as ‘Gingerbread Resistance Song’ – and the zany cover image. This funtime atmosphere should not distract from the fact that the three players are evidently very talented and work well together as a combo, paying close attention to dynamics and counterpoint, and there’s nary a fluffed note in sight. Strong gender balance – two female players in front – is also a welcome sign of inclusivity. (05/10/2020)

First item is by Eisuke Yanagisawa. This Japanese genius has previously come our way with his record of sounds discovered using a bat detector, and another fine CD of wind sounds revealed by the Aeolian harp. For Wetland (imm 001), he visited a certain site in the Kyoto Basin called Mizorogaike and produced these three field recordings, around 10-12 minutes apiece. The pond is noteworthy because a number of rare species thrive in its environs; plants, insects, fish, birds and mammals, some of which have a lineage which can be traced back to the ice age.

Yanagisawa’s ecological concerns come to the fore; he points out that some of these species are at risk of extinction now, not simply because of mankind’s urban intrusions, but because of the introduction of other species of creatures which endanger the ancient ones. He makes this point, however, in an extremely gentle manner; the recordings, which incidentally are very serene and beautiful to listen to, foreground the life of the pond, but include traffic sounds and airplane sounds in the distant background. Eisuke Yanagisawa invites us to listen, but also invites us to imagine how the pond would have sounded several million years ago. By allowing the ancient past and the present to co-mingle in this artistic space, creating what he calls a form of “chaos”, we can hear these things manifested as “a layer of sediment” of the site.

The three recordings are framed within very distinct parameters: the first, where the pond was frozen and there was snow everywhere, and the recording features the very evocative sound of a temple bell in the distance. The second, recorded at midnight, foregrounds the growl of bullfrogs, which the composer regards as one of the “alien species” that trouble the ecological balance. The third was recorded under the water, using hydrophones. He had to boost the recording level as high as he could to capture the sounds of water insects, and adjusted the levels so as to tune out the noise of the cicadas. In all instances, one has ample evidence of the artist’s very strong natural sensibility, attuned to a specific place, and expressed through specific recordings techniques.

This results in a powerful, integrated statement about nature. For evidence of yet more such integration, included in the transparent package are leaves and twigs gathered from the site.

Around The Plywood (imm 022) is credited to Salad, a duo collaboration between Nagai Tsume and Masami Baba. This one’s more like a sound documentary, relating to an art installation; the curator Ayako Tsutsumi put this together in 2019 for an exhibit called “New Lagoon In Hokan-Cho, Okayama”; I think Salad were invited to contribute background music for the event, and a performance of sound art.

I’m at a loss to explain what’s happening on this rather odd but charming record; it seems to include both the friendly chatter of art patrons, engaging with the show at some level, along with very tasteful and unobtrusive instrumental music perhaps performed on an electric piano, creating jazz-tinged ambient easy-listening sounds. The two days of activity are also documented in text form, on the insert which lists a large number of short comments and remarks (in both Japanese and English); skimming through these lists reveals such pithy observations as “the smaller place makes me feel calm”, almost poetic in their simplicity. In fact they are just basic pointers as to what the audience were thinking, what they made of this audio installation as they wandered around; some of them notice the technical components, such as bluetooth, iphone, microphones and speakers; one of them says “do you use baking soda?”, a remark which has a delicious incongruity. These people certainly sound happy, and engaged, taking a simple pleasure in this audio art.

Hard to say why this record is actually quite compelling on some level; the music by itself, little more than banal wallpaper, doesn’t amount to very much, and neither does the cocktail-party chatter, but combined together, everything has a strange and simple allure. It may appear a bit self-referential, work that describes itself, but it quietly achieves a certain aesthetically pleasing result. Pictures of the equipment used for New Lagoon are shown on three small card inserts, printed on dayglo green.

With Youngso No, we’re in the area of phonography / field recording again, once again a very site-specific piece embodying particular lines of thought. The title, for starters, is quite lengthy – Time: 18:33_19:43 Date: 06 Aug 2015 Latitude/Longitude: 34°23’47.8″N 132°28’16.3″E (imm 033), so that we have a work which describes itself in an extremely specific manner. This was a technique used by Chris Watson, especially for his early Touch recordings, but he would include the grid co-ordinates and dates/time as a footnote, rather than making it an entire title.

Youngso No recorded this in Hiroshima City, and prefaces his statement by reminding us of the significance of the date of 6th August, which is in fact 70 years after the atomic bomb was dropped by Enola Gay. The work, 70 minutes in length, comprises three parts – the field recording he made in Hiroshima, along with something more process-based, which he describes with some accuracy as “sound source that converted VLF (and ELF) waves into audio”. This is probably a technical aspect of the recording process that I don’t fully comprehend; it may have something to do with converstion of radio waves. I’m more interested in the speculations and ruminations that Youngso No outlines for us, which indicates a very deep chain of though that starts with “sound is transmitted by air vibrations” and leads him to assume that we can hear, or otherwise apprehend, the sounds of dead people, and “people who will be born in the future”. This is based on the premise that even the slightest action or movement represents an “operation of life”, and must create a sound; and he believes there are certain phenomena which are beyond our normal range of perception.

While some of this may sound like it’s straying into the dubious territory staked out in recent years by those who put their faith in EVP recordings, I am persuaded that Youngso No is on quite a different tack, and his work is firmly rooted in a technical process where the transparency of the operation is paramount to him; to put it another way, he isn’t cheating with the results to make the slightest bump or glitch sound like human speech, like the EVP manipulators often do. Rather, he believes in the potential of this “framed” site-specific and time-specific snapshot to reveal something to us, provided we are patient enough to listen. All this said, you may take this CD home and put it on, only to discover 1:10:00 worth of anonymous traffic sounds not varying very much, and wonder what all the fuss is about; but, like the other two releases above, this has a strangely compelling charm that invites continued listening.

All the above from 22nd July 2020.

That’s the bit I do understand; I confess I struggle a bit to grasp how sound can be perceived “always in relation to the self and the other equally”, as the press note has it. This American artist, currently living in San Antonio, is here today with a record called Both (SECOND EDITIONS 009) on the German label that released the awful recent record by Roger Tellier-Craig. It’s on vinyl and presented with a plain typo-heavy cover, though it seems that every record on this label follows a design template like this. As far as I can make out it’s two sides of field recordings, though it may not be quite as simple as that. The long side ‘Library’ was recorded was recorded in public at the Library in San Antonio, but it’s not a straight documentary; it seems she positioned an open microphone so it could be fed through two loudspeakers. Presumably this had the effect of “pushing” the ambient sound back into the very space was producing it. Additionally, there are electronic sine tones played back in this acousmatic set-up, which were “pitched specifically to the building’s dimensions and resonant frequencies.” I don’t fully grasp what this entails, nor what it implies, but my guess it that is has something to do with applying sound to the surrounding architecture in some way.

Already this feels more like an installation work, a very site-specific one, of the kind we used to hear a lot some years ago from Achim Wollschied. The device of reflecting or folding the environmental sound back into the site that produced it was also used by C M Von Hausswolff, except he did it in a rather aggressive manner, attempting through his intervention to reveal hidden things about the cities which he visited, often things which most people would rather not know about. On paper, this “curated arrangement” of Rousay’s seems convincing, although I’m not quite able to grasp how it amounts to a “conceptual composition”, nor can I perceive how it amounts to a “blending [of] architectural space and human interaction”. The human beings are in the space all right, but Rousay’s work reduces their chattering and meandering to empty background noise, almost as if she has no interest in the human race at all. Where’s the “engagement” we are promised? And I have heard other sound artists who attempt to investigate architectural space, for instance Philip Sulidae in Australia and Eric La Casa in France, who communicate a great deal more about the truth of buildings than Rousay on this record.

The second piece ‘Two Things’ is more successful; for one thing it’s far more eventful, and contains a lot of sonic drama, even a vague sense of excitement which the sedate library vista lacks. Familiar and unfamiliar sounds vie for our attention, recognisable real-world incidents jostling for space in among strange drones and static buzz. Human beings appear fleetingly in the smallest of aural glimpses. Apparently she made the whole thing inside an apartment, yet still captures a lot of the outside world (probably by sticking the microphone outside the window). I’d like to think this is a collage-construction, one of those drifty documentary recordings that floats around collecting what sounds it may and presenting them back to the listener to make sense of the jigsaw that surrounds us.

Convincing work on the whole, but not very innovative, and doesn’t quite deliver on the high-flown artistic claims of the label. From 1st July 2020.

However, reading the extensive literature around this release reveals it’s part of a much larger project, with a geo-political agenda. Cusack is calling attention to a very specific environmental crisis in Kazakhstan, a country in central Asia that used to be part of the Soviet Republic. There’s been a massive water problem there since the 1960s apparently, due to large-scale irrigation works by the Russians, causing the Aral Sea – once one of the largest inland lakes in the world – to nearly vanish. (Can you imagine what forces it would take to make an entire lake disappear?) Cusack’s sound recordings were made in Tastubek, the Aral Sea, the River Naryn and other key points, and the accompanying text and photographs all tell aspects of the story, revealing particular instances of water usage and abuse. He did it over a five year period starting in 2013, so I have to assume this is a fairly comprehensive audio survey.

Reading about this on my own account, I find that evidently it’s been an environmental catastrophe on a grand scale, bad for nature and bad for the planet, causing health hazards, and has also ruined the local fishing industry and led to mass unemployment. Yet this Cusack record doesn’t hector or harangue the listener with political diatribes; each recording unfolds quietly and calmly, standing as factual reportage, and leaving ample room for debate and consideration. It seems this particular situation might be slowly recovering, as “water levels are rising again and the environment is showing signs of revival”, but clearly it’s not something the human race can be especially proud of. Credit to Cusack for patiently producing such a detailed artistic statement on this complicated situation, and making a good record to boot. From 18 September 2019.