Nice item from UK composer Louise Rossiter, a contemporary acousmatic musician based in Leicester who (on Soundcloud) goes by the endearing nickname of “Mad Lou”. The short record Der Industriepalast Part I (OSCILLATIONS OSC005) has been released as a download when it might easily have made a nice vinyl release as two 12-inch singles.
The “man as machine” trope may induce a ho-hum moment in the unsuspecting listener surfeited with Kraftwerk derivations, but take heart – Mad Lou has brought her own bottle of homebrew to the picnic, and I find there’s a lot of detail, craft and attention packed into her samples and layers, some of which have been sourced directly from locations in her home town. The other clever device has been to use a 1926 infographic poster as some sort of compositional tool, or even as direct inspiration. Fritz Kahn, whose work I never heard of before, is regarded by historians as a “pioneer” of the infographic, and while his precise illustrations from the 1920s and 1930s are beautiful, they are also packed with genuine information and knowledge – he happens to have been a scientist, astronomer, writer and humanist, and had a lot to say about all these areas. I mention this as so many “infographics” cluttering up the web these days are vapid and empty, contain no truth, and are poorly-designed.
Kahn’s famous work is called Man As Industrial Palace, the “ultimate” cut-away view which applies factory and engineering metaphors to parts and functions of the human body. Both title and artwork have been borrowed by Rossiter for her work; she also borrowed the ‘Neuronen’ chart, which likened the human nervous system to the mechanism of a doorbell, and her ‘Synapse’ builds on a similar Kahn proposal, which compared the anatomy to an entire electrical grid. There’s ample room here for a lesser musician to turn in a raft of clichés and produce music of terrible banality, but Rossiter pulls through with her imagination, her restless shifting of textures and tonalities in search of a real dynamic force, and the ingenious way she manages to “humanise” her sounds, never settling for the familiar cold and alien modes so common in this field. In doing so, she’s arguably come very close to producing a plausible audio analogue to the ideas of humanist Kahn. (March 2023)