Richard Scott is tracing some Delirious Cartographies (ARBITRARY 13)…this composer / improviser fellow is very au fait with analogue synths, and that’s what we hear on this EP release, although the electronic sound is also spliced up with interludes and episodes of field recordings he hath made.
He says “these pieces open the doors”. You could hear the record as a constant back-and-forth journey between the artificial studio world of his synths, and the real world poking in as the phonograph moments pour in. A lot of them are quite watery – vivid rainstorms on ‘Fragments of an everyday cosmos’ – and he owns freely to make use of the hydrophone, a microphone which you can submerse in the watery depths. The sonic Cartographies are supplemented by six visual ones – that’s right, drawings / prints in black and white which are included in the bundle. Eno and Peter Schmidt are my primo example of this – the Before and After Science LP (1977) was marketed as “fourteen pictures”, i.e. the ten Eno songs and the four Schmidt prints. Richard Scott lists his array of equipment – modular synths and Euroracks and maxMSP software…and his microphones, and his recorders…but far from being lost inside his technical marvels, he’s using them to pursue his vision.
His vision is simple enough, based on his own experiences or apprehensions of the world around him, but there’s two intriguing aspects – (1) he takes his own memories as important, equally important as the things he’s remembering and (2) he realises his experiences are “incomplete” at some level. He might be like the narrator in the Robert Graves poem ‘In Broken Images’, who mistrusts his own fragmentary thinking to the extent that it actually sharpens his senses, and increases his brain power. In this way, Scott arrives at what he calls “molecular dialogues”; assembling his sources in the manner of a mosaic, freely mixing up time and space, making connections that did not exist before, and refusing the easy options of a narrative approach. Right away this puts Delirious Cartographies some distance away from a good part of the “field recording” genre, where diarists and travellers can’t help producing some sort of mini-slide show or snapshot-record of their wanderings. The use of the word “cartographies” is probably relevant here, as though Scott were producing a map, but a map to imaginary landscapes, or showing us new ways to traverse the existing terrain, much as the Situationists hoped to do with their remappings of Paris, based on their crazy directionless walking episodes.
As to the “delirious” aspect, what we hear is actually very subtle and refined, rather than a crazed or feverish jumbling of elements, but this is what makes the work all the more effective; the journey, the path, the landscape, the weather all keep changing and shifting imperceptibly beneath our feet, so that we can start out in sunshine and end up halfway out in the ocean before we realise what’s happened. Oh yes, Axel Dörner is here on one track, blowing his typical breathy trumpet alongside some live sampling malarkey from Scott using his maxMSP software, and a specially-built controller interface. And looking again at those “graphic interludes”, they are minimal squiggles which are completely non-specific…perhaps if we overlaid them on a Google map of the neighbourhood they might reveal something we hadn’t noticed before, or serve as an itinerary to an unexpected destination. And there’s a lengthy written text by Scott included in the set which articulates everything.
We’ve heard this fellow before on Discus Music with Everything Is Always At Once, but if you dig the abstract longitudes he’s layin’ down here, then look out for Tales From the Voodoo Box and Bastard Science on the Sound Anatomy label. Part of the Framework Editions series curated by Mads Emil Nielsen. (24 October 2023)