Lacklustre and vague set of field recordings, sound art, performance and conceptual pieces compiled on Sounds of Absence (GRUENREKORDER GRUEN 209). It was put together by Joshua Weitzel and Wingel Mendoza, as part of a larger project led by Peter Kiefer under the aegis of A.R.S. (Art-Research-Sound) at a music school in Mainz.
Kiefer’s project began by asking “what is the sound of absence?”, which he did right at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, and built a website to gather contributions; I think they were mostly field recordings of what certain parts of the modern world (especially famous landmarks) sounded like when they were deserted, as they were under lockdown. He carried on the idea as we all entered a second term of isolation, and invited contributors to focus specifically on the notion of “absence”. Potentially, this could be interesting – when you think of such things as a department store window still giving out signals which we can hear with electro-magnetic devices, even when the shop is closed down. It does at least make the listener aware that even when we managed to empty out the world to a large extent, there was still something going on, some activity we couldn’t quite perceive.
If only the actual recordings on the disc were a bit more engaging; some of them are claimed to pass on a frisson of “spookiness” like a haunted train, but I’m feeling very little emotional charge from any one of these greyed-out, near-blank audio speculations. These random audio snapshots are loosely tied together by Weitzel’s sleeve note, where he makes some effort to explain the theme or underlying pattern, but he mostly just describes the processes involved, and thereby exposes the work for what it is – a very ordinary description of our surroundings. Used to be, phonographers would visit a site charged with meaning or incident and hope, through their art, to reveal something new about the world; conversely this compilation just confirms a series of rather banal facts about the environment, in a dispassionate manner with very little aesthetic charm. From 5th July 2022.