One hour of audio confusion and chaos on Slices Of Life (MILLE PLATEAUX MP 67), concocted by Asha Sheshadri and Mattin for Edition Erich Schmid. It’s a collage of everyday sounds from urban environments thrown together every which way, captured in Berlin and New York during 2022 – a Covid year, of course, so lockdown is likely to have motivated the plan in some way. They also snapped pix on their smartphones, some of which might be printed on the jumbled-up cover here. I kind of hated this at first (seemed trivial and banal), but now I’m finding some curious sparks of excitement in its random snippets of content.
Contemplations (empreintes DIGITALes IMED 24189) is a survey of electro-acoustic compositions by Emma Margetson from Derby (UK), dating from 2015 to 2022. Mostly she used very simple means – close-miked objects, concentrating on one subject per composition, no especially radical changes and no foregone conclusions about what the work “means”. By the time of 2019’s ‘Sketching Froanna’ she attempts an ambitious eight-channel composition, responding to the lines and shapes of an artwork by Wyndham Lewis. If there’s an underlying theme to Margetson’s observations, it’s about introspection and reflection, linked to the passing of time. Some pieces might be prosaic and descriptive, but I like her understated outlook on the world.
Canadian France Jobin is more than just a musician – she wants to occupy large spaces, and does gallery installations and film work, perhaps even overlapping with architecture in some way. Her Infinite Probabilities (Particle 2) (ROOM40 RM4234) continues to explore her ideas about quantum mechanics and string theory, including deep ideas about physics and dimensions. These scientific areas are unfamiliar to me, but it seems she too admits she was out of her depth, yet compelled to keep exploring from her sense of restless curiosity. She had an epiphany – “feeling adrift and perplexed isn’t a hindrance but rather an advantage” – and perhaps endeavours to share it on this record. Impressive; there’s a real sense of tremendous weight and depth to these minimal tones, and we can truly feel the excitement of the journey as the piece advances.
Let’s enter the “overload zone” for new releases by Stefan Goldmann, one of which is a five-CD box set. First we have Alluvium (MACRO M77), a single CD of 12 tracks from this German-Bulgarian DJ and electronica artiste, based on “research” in various parts of the world including his home Berlin, Istanbul, Sofia and Thessaloniki. No field recordings from those locations (in case you were expecting same); it’s all electronic, and he’s exploring the potential combinations of machine-created rhythms, set down in irregular patterns that mess up any sense of a “grid”. It’s the third such release in his series of “metric assymetry”. While this might be mistaken for some form of experimental Techno, it’s highly conceptual in nature and expressly designed to confound the listener’s expectations. Goldmann states his thesis with the ruthless precision of an academic presenting a scientific paper, but it’s still highly listenable.
All the above from 2 April 2024.