Lockdown albums continued to arrive in 2022. Daniel Menche made one called Forlorn (ROOM40 RM4183), released as a cassette by Room 40. The word itself contains everything he wants to say about his personal situation in 2020-21. Well, mostly. His personal solution to the feeling of forlornness is to take long walks in the woods near where he lives, hoping to achieve a certain blanked-out state of mind; if he loses track of time, or even gets lost in the woods, he counts his personal odyssey a success. Hasn’t all his music been about the listener getting lost in some way? That’s the question he propounds today, hoping to pass on to us a state where time becomes meaningless, and we are obliged to contemplate his sounds for a very long time, well past the point when curfew beckons and all good tenants are tucked up in bed. To this end, Forlorn is spread out in two 20 minute lengths on the sides of this tape, though to some it may feel more like 20 hours, or 20 days. Gently rising and falling drone with a sinister edge, it be; well-executed and remorseless, but didn’t Menche used to be a bit more violent and confrontational than this? (19/04/2022)
Cole Peters had a similar crisis of identity during his lockdown in Manitoba. To put it plainly, space and time collapsed for him, and he felt like the vast landscape might swallow him up or dissolve his personality in a some way. He began to doubt his own existence. For Menche, walks in the forest were the solution, but Peters mended his broken self by revisiting the practice of field recording. Art as therapy. Though he visited many exciting territories in Canada, he still doesn’t regard A Certain Point Of Intertia (DRM4134) as a field recording album, and rather claims that it is “a narrative work, voiced by my surroundings and my evolving interpretations of them.” I like the idea of plugging yourself back into the landscape to combat what was, for him, a vague and crippling sense of paralysis, but the record itself communicates very little of his internal struggle. Only the tempestuous opening cut ‘Immersion as a Means of Erosion’ has much drama or moment to it.
Noted Robert Takahashi Crouch and his Jubilee record from 2021; now for Ritual Variations (DRM4138) he has taken the opening track ‘A Ritual’, and passed it to other artistes to remix it, all of whom are personal friends of his or people whose work he respects. ‘A Ritual’ is more than just a piece of music, it’s a performance too, and in its original form was only performed for an audience of one person, Crouch’s own partner Yann Novak. Given that it was an extremely private piece of work, addressing deep and very personal themes close to Crouch, I’m a tad surprised that he elected to undertake this collaborative project, but fundamentally the piece was about “sharing”, so I suppose it does make sense on some level. Among the contributors here are Byron Westbrook, Christina Giannone, Faith Coloccia, France Jobin, Marcus Fisher, and Novak himself. They were all allowed access to the original 2-hour source materials, so they heard something that we never heard on the 19-minute published edit on Jubilee. Each one tries to re-express the themes of intimacy as best they can.
The label owner Lawrence English revisits his memorable Antartica recordings from 2010 on Viento (RM4190), reissuing them on CD with a book. Two long documents of wild blizzards buffeting the landscape and buildings as the hapless artiste made an unexpected stopover at an airbase on his way to visit the Argentine Antarctic division. He lovingly describes the details of the situation in prose form, observing the effects on the temperature and weather, making sure to record his own personal impressions as he rhapsodises what he perceives as “phasing choral drones” and “low frequency vibrations”. The experience led him to ruminate on how insignificant it made him feel, like “a small speck of dust”. Chilling wind sounds and rattling metal abound. The recordings were originally put out on vinyl by Taiga Records in America, now quite rare and expensive (especially the coloured vinyl pressing), but for this 2022 revisit he has remixed and remastered the freezing blasts.
All four above from 19 April 2022.