Two cassettes from the small-run Montreal label Presses Précaires courtesy of Anne-F Jacques, whose hand-stamped cover artworks exude charm…
Elizabeth Millar is the Canadian genius who has graced our lives in the past with releases on the Mystery & Wonder label, sometimes playing her self-built instruments when not duetting with Craig Pedersen. On AFR3, she’s focussing on sound sculptures made from found materials and discarded pieces of electronic equipment, which apparently have some kind of mechanical life of their own, allowing them to generate non-normal sounds. They’re also built in such a way that they eventually fall apart, or just collapse into a state of inertia. It’s these sounds of decaying devices that are captured on AFR3, a title which unpacks into “artificial field recordings” – indicating that Millar has, not content with capturing the sounds from ordinary environments via field and stream, has gone ahead and built her own.
The above lines of prose may suggest something on a grand scale, and we might assume that the sculptures are life-size robots flailing around as they march towards the mechanical graveyard. However, I think the truth is that these devices / objects are miniatures, something on the order of a Swiss watch combined with a hand-held music box and an Edwardian wind-up doll; the sounds emanating from the cassette are intimate and strange. We have to pay close attention to these tiny sounds, guessing as to what may be going on within this tiny world of cogs, trip-hammers, and delicate metal chains. Millar justifies her claim that they should be regarded as “self-contained systems”; the sound invites us to enter into a small, mechanical garden through a tiny Alice in Wonderland doorway, and enjoy the surroundings.
Floating Tape Ruban Flottant is a highly collaborative piece of work, between artists who make sound art and also happen to manage their own small-run tape labels. It’s the first in a planned series of such collaborations – the plan is that two artists will create the sounds, a third will do the mixing, while the fourth will release it on their label. For this piece, the sounds of Bardo Todol and Chemiefaserwerk have been mixed by Zhu Wenbo, resulting in four tracks of music and sounds and an engaging anecdote by Zhu, who happens to run the Zoomin’ Night label in Beijing, about the circumstances of their creation. He speaks warmly of a secret bond between the creators, a bond established by cassettes; for instance, Chemiefaserwerk is Christian Schiefner who runs the Falt label, which has released nearly 100 intriguing items by marginals and minimalists since its inception in 2016. Bardo Todol is the enlightened Argentinean soul Pablo Picco, who we noted for his part on the 2020 tape Tu Cara Estirada Por El Extasis, with its hints of rich surrealist poetry.
Like many similar projects in this area, this international adventure seems to have come around through correspondence, shared interests, and mutual amicability. They also spent a healthy amount of time planning and pondering the work, as recordings were made and traded back and forth, and deliberating about the title – which, as it turns out, derives from a memory of Zhu Wenbo when he was a young teen in the 1990s and he used to see discarded unspooled tapes everywhere, snarled in the trees or lying unwanted on the road. What could be perceived by many as junk or trash was taken by him as a near-poetic symbol of something, as he wondered to himself what music, or information, might be recorded on these discarded tapes. He wouldn’t be the first soul to be stirred by such thoughts – after all, Mark Vernon has made a whole career from locating such tapes and retrieving data from them – but the point is well made. What we hear on Floating Tape Ruban Flottant is not derived from discarded cassettes, but for Zhu Wenbo the whole project has become an extended metaphor for his teenage vision, as the artists here sent their tapes “floating” on the wind or across the ocean, in the hopes of finding a receptive pair of ears. The results are wonderful audio puzzles, four snippets and fragments that will beguile the curious mind.
The above from 6th January 2022.