Great cassette from Ogrob (Seb Borgo) is Errances Cryptophoniques: Socret (VICE DE FORME VF12), on which he does the insect and bat recording thing according to his own peculiar tastes and strategies.
The noises made by these insects and bats are largely inaudible, but the tape itself is packed with weird and, at time, rather threatening and alien sounds of scraping, chirping, and buzzing. He did it over a period of several years, working at night, making “heterodyne” recordings between 2011 and 2018, apparently gathering his sounds in a remote pastoral location in Montenars in the Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Besides the wildlife, it seems we’re also picking up some audible elements of the surrounding countryside too. Although not listed on the Bandcamp page, there are eight distinct track titles here, which (for some reason) appear to be expressed in the Corsican language – what else would we expect from this French-born creator when he visits Italy. These titles seems to be describing the actions of the tiny monsters he’s recording, occasionally making reference to the weather too. We should also point out that he says he hasn’t done any editing or processing, in distinction to some insect obsessives (Thomas Tilly being one) who may sometimes need to amplify his tiny sounds or mix them up with electronic music.
Most insect and bat recordings I’ve heard (a surprising number have come our way) tend to be quite benign and listenable, presenting a positive aspect to nature’s bounty and leaving the listener on an upbeat note. This being Ogrob, I find there is something dark and unknown constantly lurking around the edges of these sound-art works, and it doesn’t seem particularly pleasant; knowing his rather pessimistic view of the world, this doesn’t fail to surprise me. Also knowing his penchant for pranks, one is sometimes led to doubt the veracity of the entire project, especially as it’s often very hard to connect these bizarre sounds (some of which appear almost mechanical) to the actual behaviour of insect wildlife. However, it’s perhaps churlish to entertain such thoughts. Errances Cryptophoniques is also, he claims, part of a much wider project where he intends to wander at night and pick up any ultra-sound emanations that may come his way; primarily he would go somewhere as far away from human civilisation as possible and wallow in the ecosystems, but he’s also tempted towards military and industrial sites and power stations. If so, that latter predilection isn’t too far away from a strain of such sound art that was prevalent in the late 1990s, including such as Scanner, Disinformation, John Duncan, and other paranoids who extracted gloomy and troubling conclusions from similar sites. Ogrob is planning, or may have already carried out the plan, to play back his recordings through loudspeakers at gigs, using quadraphonic systems if he can get them, or using a relay of connected cassette players situated through the venue.
In the meantime, we’ll settle for this tape, which we’re enjoined to play through headphones, at low volumes, in the dark. I haven’t dared. From 5th July 2022.