Jim Denley and the eternally orchestrating sonoverse
With Weather Volume 2: Gadigal Country
AUSTRALIA SPLITREC 32 CD / 2LP (2023)
Australian field recordings with minimal musical interjections from Denley. May be considered a follow-up record to In Weather Volume 1: The Hidden Valley from 2022; on that occasion Denley was doing it with three other collaborators, but this one is a solo venture.
The “eternally orchestrating sonoverse” is his way of identifying his surroundings, and explicitly claiming all of nature (weather, air, animals, birds, insects) as his partners and musical contributors, as he goes to and performs in very specific locations in national parks and preserved wild areas in Australia. He names all of these locations in the diary-form sleeve notes, as he documents his actions, and gets even more precise about what he sees, what forms of life come his way, how they interact with him, and for how long they do it – seemingly timed by stopwatch. Every moment is precious to him. He himself may not be doing much more than playing his flute (and using his voice) in the open air, but it’s the interactions with nature that he wishes to showcase, both on these recordings and in his detailed annotations.
To put this in context, it’s a given that he’s informed by 100% green-ecological-environmentally-sensitive motivations, and is also radically pro First Nation Peoples in all his utterances, naming the Eora Nation and admonishing any die-hard colonialists with the stark statement “this Country was never ceded. Respects are paid to elders – past, present and emerging.” Jim Denley is arguably evolving a very personal form of music, stressing his own alignment with the forces of nature in a way that’s politically active, ecologically aware, and musically viable too. He challenges many of our assumptions, based on what he would regard as old-school thinking, in all of these areas; and he goes out of his way to be as inclusive as possible of all forms of life.
I applaud his method, and I like the record well enough, but I just wish he would give the jargon a rest – he has many neologisms at his disposal to bolster his creed, such as “the resulting recording…exscribes the expression of other beings” (his way of saying “there are dogs barking on the tape”) and “our analytical instruments…differentiate and compress each raindrop as an individuated presence”, inviting us to admire his “eco-harmonicity”. It’s as if he feels obliged to write his own art gallery catalogue entry, with prose that borders on pretentious. He’s also a little too quick to direct the listener’s ear with his annotations, which act as pointers and maps to make sure we don’t miss a single nuanced moment. I’m sure that I richly deserve to be chastened for my old-fashioned ways, but with his insistent, closely-argued texts, Denley comes close to pre-empting any other response to his work. (05/10/2024)