Marc Baron / Mark Vernon
post-chance
USA ERSTWHILE RECORDS erstwhile 097 CD (2024)
Magnets in envelopes…very exacting use of time-lines…just two aspects of this rather unusual collaboration between Mark Vernon, the UK sound composer with his diverse collection of found tapes, and Marc Baron, the French saxophone improviser who is also a tape composer. Matter of fact we heard a nice piece by him released on cassette and noted by us in 2021, for the More Mars label. Very coincidentally, that piece also made use of magnets.
Well, these two fellows took a very oblique approach to the time-honoured and well-known practice of sending each other tapes in the mail, when they decided to do their collaboration. This ship-em-out strategy has been used by everyone from Merzbow to Al Margolis and especially Achim Wollschied, and I assumed it had long been abandoned once science gave us the gift of the internet, and people started sending digital audio files to each other instead. A part of me is encouraged that our two friends found the time to buy Jiffy-bags, stand in a queue, and weigh their parcels at the Post Office, especially at a time when conventional postal services are under considerable strain around the world and might not even survive in their present form.
As part of their plan, Baron and Vernon – who had apparently never even met up in person before this juncture – agreed to put magnets inside the envelopes, knowing full well that this would cause partial erasure of the contents as the parcel travelled along its merry way. Baron has wielded magnets on his S<–> N (A Path Of Chaos) tape (see above) and Vernon is no stranger to damaging and distorting his tapes through interventionist actions, such as burying them in the earth. There’s also the use of time codes and date / times of recordings forming a big part of the compositional structure in some way – see the liner notes for more detail – a structuralist film-maker, such as Guy Sherwin, would have nodded his head in agreement, I suspect – and this has allowed for a certain amount of interesting overlap and show-through in the finished work, and a diligent listener might be able to tell the difference between the original tape and the version that was partially-wiped after its hellish journey through the mails with the magnet.
All told, this correspondence event took them over a year in elapsed time. I think they only met up to do a final arrangement of the tapes, and at that point they had a mutual moment of self-doubt, unsure as to whether the whole project had been a good idea, or whether the finished results would yield anything of value. Speaking for myself, I didn’t derive a great deal of listening enjoyment from post-chance, which never seems to catch fire or yield a single exciting moment of audio among its muffled murmurations, lengthy gaps, and perplexing lack of shape. The elaborate process somehow feels like it should have created a more surprising result; similar John Cage operations involving chance elements have been far more productive. I blame the magnets; I really do. I think the idea of negating your actions in an art context is a risky proposition, one to be treated delicately and with great caution. That, and surrendering too much artistic control to the vicissitudes of the post service, and allowing a regulated pre-planned structure to assume too much importance in one’s creative actions, are the characteristics of this release that disappoint me. From 14 February 2024.