New Zealand-born composer John Young here with Espaces Lointains (empreintes DIGITALes IMED 24186), showcasing his interest in combining sound sources and field recordings with digital transformations.
What a dull set. Well, I like the idea of telling a “sound story” by sweeping the listener across multiple distant locations, as he does on 2019’s ‘Hidden Spaces’ which combines diary recordings made in Sweden, Montreal, and Italy, yet he somehow fails to convey any sense of life in these portraits; even the pig farm in Dobbiaco which you’d hoped would be a sty of grunting licentiousness emerges as a zone of virtually zero interest. The more recent ‘Filaments and Phases’ gets off on a marginally better footing, with its elaborate literary sources, Levi-Strauss filtered through a modern poet Simon Perrill. Perrill’s words, or some of them, might have made it onto the finished recording, fragments of syllables surfacing through the sonic processing. There’s also ‘Le chant en dehors’ which, in a very abstruse fashion shows how Young has taken to heart lessons from Poulenc with his contrasting sonorities.
Only ‘Sweet Anticipation’ manages to deliver a scintilla of excitement, with its real-world captures from New York City, including snippets of traffic sound and enthused preachers who talk very loudly on the subway system. Yet John Young is at pains to distance himself from any idea that he might be “evoking a sense of place”; his studio-based abstractions and derivations are of far more interest to him, as he methodically bleeds away the sweat, juice, and passion of NYC. (02/04/2024)