Two cassettes from Canada received 14 July 2023. Tossapol has his own touchy-feely take on the field recording genre as manifested on No Plot, Only Landscape (PRESSES PRECAIRES) cassette. He likes to walk around and touch things, sometimes applying a scratchy claw here or a soft fingerprint there. Record button on, these digit-based explorations mingle with the weather and the atmosphere of the forests visited by this Bangkok creator. While “plot” may have a double meaning in this context, it doesn’t refer to a plot of land but to the storyline in a piece of cinema. Tossapol loves “slow cinema”, and if he likens his pieces to cinema, his preference would be a film where nobody says a word, and the starring role is taken by the location (rather than a human being). In fact, if he had his way, he would even dispense with images. Potentially radical notions from our Thai friend here, and even if this short 25-min tape is aurally rather under-nourished, there’s some fine humming on side B, suggestive of friendly insects and a sickly warm sun overhead.
Faring better, me, with Two Rooms (PRESSES PRECAIRES), which on one level is a very imaginative take on the “music made by shifting furniture around an interior space” genre, which is arguably a real thing if you consider La Monte Young’s formal experiments in that area. Two Chinese creators here, Mengting Zhuo and Li Song. Mengting comes from a performance art and installation art background, and she’s one of those daring to pose awkward questions about society, the human body, and our perceptions of noise. Li Song, lui, does what he does from the safety of his laptop, joining the ranks of those who use their mouse and keyboard to improvise with digital, processed sounds. On A side it’s a concert – that’s right – performed in London and working to a score, which may seem a tad surprising, but if you listen I think every step they take around the performance space has been carefully orchestrated and mapped out in advance. ‘Room with Air Conditioning’ is thus 15 minutes of abstract noisy delight made with a mix of furniture and speakers / mics (so perhaps a little feedback hum bleeding in). And electric fans. Use of fish line makes me wish I’d been there to witness how they deployed this piece of angling equipment.
No less fabboo is ‘Room with wooden floors’ on the B-side. Also a live concert, also scored, also using much the same minimal array of non-musical objects, this time including a clock and fabrics and a snare drum, probably for its resonant frequencies on the goat hide. Again, footsteps on the wooden floor are much in evidence. It’s as much a dance / performance piece as a good hunk of noisery. Citizens of Waterloo area in London were invigorated by amazing featherweight drone for 16 mins, occasionally flowering forth into an angry red rose of edible feedback. But this description doesn’t convey the genius of these Chinese players, whose gift is for focus, clarity of intention, engagement with physical objects in the space of one specific venue and, through this gateway, a deeper engagement with society at large. Excellent.