Modelbau
Extricate
POLAND SUBLIME RETREAT SR018 CD (2024)
Yes, it’s Frans de Waard under one of his many alias names, here with a single one-hour piece made for this Polish label, possibly divided into 14 parts.
As Modelbau, this hyper-productive creator from the Netherlands made over 100 releases since about 2011 or 2012; his method was mainly to work live in the studio, playing tapes in real time I suppose. After ten years, he or somebody else compiled a big book of Modelbau and all their recordings, at which point de Waard decided on a change of emphasis. He had every single Modelbau recording in his personal archive (presumably including all the unissued portions), and decided to move away from the real-time approach and try some overdubbing and layering techniques. The results of that action are now issued as Extricate. Its contents have been drawn from the 2020-21 segment of the archive and he mixed it all together in 2022.
Frans de Waard is no stranger to the idea of “recycling”; you might find this urge to repurpose, transform, and reuse recorded sounds in almost all of his projects, which since 1981 all represent his own very personal and productive update on the traditional precepts of musique concrète. For this item, he’d like to stress the natural “flow” of the piece – although there may be fourteen separate movements, there’s nothing dramatic to mark the changes between them, and his watchword of the day is “always moving”. There are very few, if any, recognisable landmarks or reference points to guide the listener as we drift through this slow and heavily abstracted zone, in places quite unsettling in its nightmarish hue and deep fog of uncertainty. (30/04/2024)