Chamber Music (ANTS AG26) by Steve Peters, American sound artist who has collaborated with Steve Roden (and many others) and may be based in Seattle, although he’s also travelled to New York and New Mexico and to exotic international locales in pursuit of his muse.
Title of Chamber Music might (for a couple of seconds) lead one to expect classical compositions for a small ensemble, but in fact this is all process art; it comes down to recordings he made in empty rooms, which have then been reprocessed – mostly using filters, I think – to allow him to focus on “room tone”, that most elusive of qualities. To get there he has to isolate the “resonant frequencies” of the room, and enlarge them to the extent that we can begin to notice them. These projects were recorded over a number of years, from about 2007 to 2013, and all of them were replayed in the rooms where the sounds were captured. They’ve all got evocative names and they were mostly manifested as audio installation pieces in art galleries or suitably sympathetic spaces, such as a library or a chapel. Some of them had visual components too, and I suppose the entirety of the such pieces can be understood as a form of collaboration with Rick Araluce, Mary Welch, Scott Sherk, Jasmine Valandani et al., who investigate subtleties in form and space that exist on the margins and have been overlooked by many. Through that playback action, often using random play and endless repeat actions, Steve Peters aims to achieve a potentially infinite number of combinations, and a degree of unpredictability happening right there in the room.
Well, we don’t quite get the full magoo on this CD, which has been prepared as a “studio approximation” of the real thing, but you can dig where his mind is at and whence his spirit is emanating. It’s clearly intended as something very benign; when Carl Michael von Hausswolff did the “playback” thing with his source tapes replayed in certain cities, his intentions were very far from benign, some might say downright hostile. While Chamber Music is very refined, subtle, and a soothing listen, there’s also something profoundly empty about it; it may have begun life in a real, physical space, but the finished product is so disembodied that it has no audible connection to that space that we can discern. Most of the time all we can hear are the actions of the filters work, with all their digital artefacts. Full marks for attempting to bottle “room tone”, which seems as daunting a project as when Howard Hughes attempted to prove his identity by sending a jar of his breath to the insurance company. (This never happened – it’s from Mad Magazine – but it’s a great joke). From 20 September 2023.