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.