Lisa Lerkenfeldt from Melbourne was last heard with Glass Braid (from 2017) from the Vienna Press cassette label. She’s here today with a cassette, Shell Of A City (ROOM40 RM4216), which might have been made using the vibrating concrete of highways as a starting point – field recordings captured from the roads and now remade as long droney sound art, through processing. Industrial elements also featured somewhere in the making of Glass Braid, but at several steps remove – much the same “distancing” process as we find here. The gritty physical reality of tarmac and ringways is not ours to savour, and the end results are ghostly and ethereal, not easy to connect back to the familiar experience of traffic sound as we understand it. But being given that information, and the rather evocative suggestion in the title that we’re hearing nothing but the remnants from a long-dead urban civilisation, does add a certain poignancy to this somewhat bleak listen. Lerkenfeldt, however, might have intended something quite different and reports she would be quite happy if listeners used her records for relaxing or sleeping. Her mission in life is to discover things that we tend to overlook, and claims that she “carves out space” for us to perceive and enjoy them. I would agree, except on this occasion she has carved out so much space that the source material is in danger of fading away, almost imperceptible. (08/09/2023)
