One of two new tapes received 20 July 2022 from the micro-label Presses Précaires in Montreal. Always welcome as these cassettes contain lovely sounds and qualify as hand-made art objects with their printed covers.
Tel Aviv artist Grisha Shakhnes made Brass at their home location in 2021. Just two 15-minute pieces called ‘The Decline’ and ‘Sunny’, both quite low-key and intriguing episodes where all is not as it seems. Shakhnes declines to supply much information about his methods here but does let fall that the work comprises a mix of field recordings, electronic sounds, and pieces of music by others. More to the point the tape is also intended to document his process to some extent, to be perceived as a record of him producing his art. I am reminded of Peter Gidal and one his many shibboleths about structural-materialist film (a long-since abandoned practice in avant-garde cinema), where he once stated that a film is a “record – not a reproduction, not a representation – of its own making”. He meant, I suppose, that it wouldn’t be sufficient to show images of the editing equipment you used, rather that the celluloid material itself must bear the traces of all your work, such as exposures, flares, edits, splices, mistakes, and any malarkey wrought with the optical printer. At the same time Gidal despised “gestural” art such as abstract expressionism, so if you ended up with too many “splurgy” effects printed on your 16mm film, you’d likely be confined to the Gidal dustbin of failure. This isn’t 100% analogous to Shakhnes’s work here, but I am interested that he’s taking this slightly reflexive route, calling attention to the process and to his own working practices.
It’s arguable that many of the phonography school (although the genre does appear to be somewhat in decline) would like to do the exact opposite, and pretend that they didn’t even visit the places they so carefully record on their hand-held Grundigs, preferring to let the “truth” of the buildings, traffic, waterfalls and weather currents shine through on the finished work. Brass, conversely, passes on a certain amount of tension and disquiet. I see we’ve been enjoying his work in these pages since 2012 onwards, starting with Passing Resemblance which he made for the American label Copy For Your Records under his Mites guise. As I recall it, that piece too was something of an enigma, leaving impressions of a very wiry irreducible core of meaning in spite of its subtle and understated surfaces; much like today’s release in fact. Its creator is adamant that “it’s not a game…the point of this music is not to start one guessing”. He refuses any cheap sentiment or emotional associations; it’s just sound, and that’s all there is.
Label owner Anne-F Jacques made the cover using hand-carved stamping blocks, working from a painting by Yael Skidelsky.