Natasha Barrett is another great whose remarkable music also inhibits me from writing anything about it. Reconfiguring The Landscape (PERSISTENCE OF SOUND POS11) is electro-acoustic music, or musique concrète if you like, or processed field recordings set into lavish compositions, or phonography in a research setting, or music intended for multi-speaker system playback, or – all of the above.
In these five instances dated between 2020 and 2023, we always get these intense and vivid documents of specific environments – be they in Graz, Venice, or a beach on Oslo, which instantly put you in the middle of an exciting sound world from the opening seconds. They then proceed to transform into something else under her gifted hands. It’s not enough to say she “processes” or “layers” the sounds. I think there’s something amazing going on with situating each captured element into a much larger canvas – a painting in sound, as corny as that sounds, executed on a wide field and one that’s constantly moving. The “impossible” aspect comes from hearing everything in precise detail. No matter how small or overlooked the entity may be – and we include the obvious birdsong as well as the sonorous old church bells – they can always be heard clearly and have their place in the composition. This seems to be more than just simple documentary field recording – it amounts to an artistic statement about the world.
Since the stated intention of this “research project” was to “provoke a new awareness of our outdoor sound environment”, on that account Natasha Barrett has exceeded all expectations. Use it to cleanse you head and you’ll never hear the same way again – even a simple walk in the park will open up new vistas. In terms of her audio transformations, I’m reminded of the profound alterations we heard on certain parts of The Architecture Of The Incidental and Psychogeographical Dip, those two 1990s surveys on Geoff Dugan’s label, although a lot of the creators there were aiming to fit in with the “Situationist” agenda, something which doesn’t appear to figure as a motive in Barrett’s world at all. Good thing too…we hear a bit too much about Guy Debord and his critiques of urban life, so it’s fitting and proper that we can hear and enjoy the work of someone who doesn’t hate the world, rather would like to celebrate it and share it.
Very good indeed. She also made Heterotopia for this label, a document of her Norwegian walks. (07/06/2023)