Perfection Of Understanding (AURAL DETRITUS audet009) is the latest instalment in what might be an ongoing ceramic/sound art thing in which our good friend Paul Khimasia Morgan has a hand…I refer you to the 2018 release Landscapes: Islands which featured recordings of performances taking place at Kay Aplin’s Ceramic House in Brighton. Joseph Young was one of the co-curators, and he also appears on today’s record. The focus here is on bringing together a number of sound-art types from China and Hong Kong, and encouraging collaborations with UK ceramicists.
This series of events took place at the Ceramic House in 2021, under the name “Interbeing”. While we have ended up with 10 pieces of noise and sound captured on the CDR, the whole Interbeing thing seems to have become rather wispy and conceptual; the creators were encouraged, by some sort of mind-meld or groupthink exercise, to visualise the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute in their heads, and use this projection to assist the work in some way. Well, it seems Jingdezhen is the world-wide capital of white porcelain, the very name itself synonymous with this refined form of ceramic art, and if you went on a pilgrimage to this part of southern China you’d simply have to visit the Imperial Kiln Museum, and then you’d understand. It’s this combination of things – the sheer perfection of craft that porcelain represents, and the mental exercise in reimagining it in your head – that gives rise to the title Perfection Of Understanding, and what’s more there’s a book of the same name published in support of this unusual project.
Represented here are Dennis Wong, Hui Ye and Vivian Xiaoshi Qin, Echo Ho, Sheng Jie and Sun-Wei, plus five cuts from Joseph Young…the Chinese / Hong Kong contributions are a baffling batch of drones, songs, and noise assemblage, of which I found Echo Ho’s ‘Broken China Chant’ the most immediately interesting – I have no idea what their intentions were, but it somehow seems to tell the story of ceramic creation in a very integrated and eventful way. At any rate this one is more imaginative than Sheng Jie and their ‘The Crazing from Jingdezhen to Kolner’, which seems to be little more than a prosaic stream of documentary recordings of a process. That said, there’s a fine musical drone implied by the motors of what I assume are potter’s wheels, and a certain poetry when overlaid with street scenes, bells, bird song and voices from other parts of the world. If you want something even more concrete and materialist, Dennis Wong’s ‘Turning The Wheel’ is a very single-minded drone piece that mesmerises for ten mins, but also creates such an enclosed and sealed-off world of sound that you’re almost drawn directly into the spinning pot, no doubt intending a metaphor for the sheer concentration of the craftsman (they are unaware of anything else). There’s also Sun-Wei with ‘Cloud Scenery’ which makes a virtue out rotating surfaces reminding us perhaps of certain improvisers who have rotated metal or abrasive surfaces to create a grindy noise, such as Pascal Battus, Ignaz Schick, Anne-F Jacques, Strotter Inst., and Jaka Berger.
The five Joseph Young pieces are pretty much “straight” documentary recordings captured in Jingdezhen, and titles such as ‘Sanding Kiln Shelves’ and ‘Porcelain Stone Mill’ tell you in advance what you’re going to hear. Water sounds feature quite a bit, either as part of a rainstorm recording or in the water mill. These pieces aren’t quite as transcendent as the Chinese cuts, but there are some nice details from traffic sound, voices, or whistling. The final touch is the cover art, showing a detail from an art piece by Valeria Nascimento. Over 600 small pieces of porcelain clay formed into rough cup shapes, with a red glaze inside. Another unusual and forward-looking collection from this UK label. From 28 January 2022.