Pierce Warnecke here with his Deafened By The Noise of Time (ROOM40 RM4149); he describes a process where he got stuck with working on a piece of music, so he borrowed some ideas from his video-making practices (yes, he’s also a gallery artist doing installations, performance and video tape art), specifically that area where he feeds one of his pet obsessions, that of watching and recording objects decay over time. He does it by moving his camera rather slowly and using stark lighting to illuminate the objects that interest him, most of which are so wrecked (burned, broken, dusty) that it’s almost impossible to recognise them now.
At this point we have to concede he’s not exactly like Jim Haynes who has initiated several “rusting” actions on objects in his lifetime, simply because he too enjoys the process of deterioration, nor such trash-hoarders as Tarab who enjoy picking over rubbish heaps to make some more general point about chaos and entropy. It’s more as though Warnecke – an American-born composer often working in Berlin – is asking himself deep questions about memory, or our perception of things; that broken and mangled water-pistol made of yellow plastic doesn’t work any more, but we kind of remember what it used to do, and this perception “pushes back” against the process of decay in some way. I guess it’s that moment of tension Warnecke is trying to hunt down; interestingly, his Memory Fragments from 2016 (for this same label) might be operating in a similar metaphysical zone. A fruitful area to explore no doubt – it might be interesting for him to widen his critique, and see how it measures up against the work of professional archaeologists, who are constantly working to determine the use and meaning of ancient artefacts from the past (using additional contextual sources). However, Warnecke might be more concerned with a general state of transience and waste which is one of the traits, sadly, of today’s consumerist world.
On this record, Pierce Warnecke is applying these ideas to sound and music; by introducing layers, interferences, corruptions (if that’s not too strong a word), and literally burying a sound in “accumulated debris”, what ends up on the record is only a small trace or detail of the original thing. Very deep! It would be nice if he gave more tangible examples of this happening, but I think I’ve understood the gist of his musical argument here. It’s also interesting to me that he resorted to this method in a moment of frustration (in 2017) when he was working on something else and found himself thwarted, blocked, annoyed at all the mistakes and flaws he could see. To resolve that artistic block, he decided to simplify, hence the record we now have in our hands. We should add that he sees it as a hopeful process, not one where the entropy of the universe leads to a dismal and futile end, but rather one of “echoes towards the future”. I’m prepared to believe that, although Deafened By The Noise of Time still feels very sad and lonely to me, with its attenuated and ill-sounding noises wafting around helplessly like blades of grass scattered by the winds. The moment of decay has been extended beyond all logical reason, and instead of the stop-motion documents of A Zed And Two Noughts, we’re watching it unfold in slow motion, a remorseless forensic analysis. From 27 July 2022.