Christopher McFall, I Throw The Switch On The Midnight Snake, Belgium, Unfathomless, U85 limited edition CD (2024)
Based in Kansas City, Missouri, smack-bang in the middle of the US Midwest where the dominant landscape is more or less flat prairie, sound explorer Christopher McFall chooses as his subject the neighbourhoods of Kansas City East and West Bottoms and their train lines as a metaphor for the train lines of the mind, going back into the past and forward into the future, with all the memories, images and impressions attached to them. From the raw sonic ambience of steel wheels moving and screeching along rail lines as train carriages move into depot yards – for the most part gritty, even seething or keening at times depending on your mood or point of view – to car noises and other recorded urban sounds, McFall obtains surprisingly expansive vistas that allow the mind and imagination to roam free. It probably helps to know Kansas City and its history as a transportation centre linking the cattle ranching industry with markets and consumers in the urban eastern United States and beyond, but you can still imagine a long, endless and ever-changing parade of cattle, cowboys, horse-drawn wagons, trains, automobiles and all the people they carried over the past 170+ years since the city was founded as a port at the confluence of Kansas and Missouri Rivers.
Best heard in its entirety as if it were one continuous track of five parts – all parts are untitled – “I Throw The Switch …” can be a mysterious, even spooky work, even though the sounds derive from everyday banal sources like a repeating loop of an ignition key starting up a car (track 2). Track 3 is an especially dark and murky soundscape piece of jangle loops and a shadowy shunting rhythm. As the volume level increases, and little details become much clearer and cleaner, the mood across the track seems to become warmer and lighter. The longest track (Track 5) is a mini-album drama in itself, starting quietly with a breezy-to-windy ambience as if describing a desert, transforming into a world of nostalgia and longing as winds appear to blow across landscapes that shift in form and shape. As the winds pass by, snapshots of images of cityscapes and people long-forgotten whip past our eyes like bits of paper or plastic bags being tossed and blown around.
You can really lose yourself in a past now long gone with this album, and your only worry is that when the album finishes, you find yourself back in a present that seems flat, dreary and superficial compared to what McFall has presented of the world he knew growing up in Kansas.