RICHARD CHARTIER – A Field For Mixing

The dedicatees of this pair of gorgeous soundscapes by Richard Chartier are, respectively, Steve Roden and William Basinski. Regarding the latter, the magnificently scary ebb and flow of the indeterminate cavernous resonance characterizing “A Desk For Mixing” is defined by its originator as “the starting point for the collaborative work Untitled 3” between the two. It is an awe-inspiring, utterly splendid track, simplicity and profoundness fused in thought-stopping suspension.

On the contrary, the 47-minute “Fields From Recording 1-8” – the title a gentle irony on the origin of the piece, whose source are processed location echoes born during travels across several continents – is one of those episodes causing us to put a question mark of sorts on Chartier’s deserved reputation as a man working at the margins of audible. In fact, it is not the first time in which this writer experiments with seriously increased volume while listening to his creations, thus enjoying an outcome that is probably at the opposite end of what the artist had initially envisioned.

By giving the proper attention to the original materials and the method with which the composer deploys them, the musicality of contemporary life is exalted, the listener inclined to forget the crudeness of people’s feelings and the heavy consequence of extreme metropolitan lifestyles. Chartier manages to filter the pessimism out, channelling the resounding features of certain environments into masses of frequencies that result both ethereal and concrete, finding a poetry of sorts in what started as a cold manifestation of hypothetical evolution.

Occasionally the focus is shifted on the animal side. A barking dog appears camouflaged amidst the urban din, whereas magnificent exotic birds make their presence fundamental in a section. Still, we’re not in front of a sheer collection of aural snapshots, which may be more or less successful but essentially means nothing. A Field For Mixing is a specialist stimulation of the emotional response that aware individuals feel when confronted with the altered order of familiar factors.

Room40

AIDAN BAKER - Blue Figures

I have been trying to unearth functional words to portray the sensations that Aidan Baker’s music elicits for over a decade now, but conveying the right metaphors every time has gradually become unfeasible. Suffice to say that - even in the theoretically more “normal” records - there are always places in which everything connects, another step to transcendence the ultimate outcome. This afternoon it happened at the beginning of the third track of this CD – “Untitled Drone” – which is shaped by a permanent, apparently interminable elongation of neighbouring loops engendering a soft contrast of malleable hums that, in turn, determined a condition of utter numbness – a mental void, as they call it - in yours truly. The birds were singing marvellously and the wind was blowing gently, making the branches of the surrounding trees waver. That everlasting sound tied my soul to the most heartbreaking quintessence of a personal universe that might be about to end, at least on its earthly shape.

Thanks to certain types of vibration, though, a man can state of having had the good luck of comprehending that the worst moments of life are still worthy of being savoured. This record – which, for mere historical data, was recorded live in Berlin and Prague in 2009 – is just an additional chance that a musician gifted with a deeper level of perception gives to someone prepared to experience the kind of inside tremor that inevitably leads to the recognition of our absolute ignorance. Once that move is made, the meaning of the word “harmony” is definitely clearer, and a new day begins without the obligation of listening to people talking, because you know where you’re going and, above all, what you need. And that, for sure, is not coming from a human entity.

Basses Frequences

JIM HAYNES - Sever + Severed

Jim Haynes is not an overly prolific record releaser, so when he decides that his material is ready for publication it must mean something. Thanks to Sever we’re the fortunate receivers of a splendid drone-based album (a reductive definition, in fact), but also witnesses of the definitive authentication of a style that has by now become instantly identifiable. The four movements include all the acoustic gifts that we’ve come to expect from this artist. Crackling, rustling, various kinds of concrete tampering, interference, pulse, competent looping, stretched distortion in turn becoming a tantalizing undercurrent highlighting a multitude of indecipherable additional activities. The whole sounds entirely human, yet somewhat alien.

What makes everything work in these consistently engaging amalgamations is Haynes’ ability of blending ingredients into a unique harmonic richness, which is compatible with the receptive listener’s system in utterly unexplainable fashion. Even the most hypothetically disconcerting emissions have a reason to be exactly there where one finds them and not only exist, but influence the addressees. When a scene is suddenly interrupted there’s no time for remaining deluded because, almost immediately, a new factor of psychological gratification intervenes to raise the level of alertness – until you get numb again, surrounded by the customary mantle of sympathetic frequencies. It goes on and on, comfortingly familiar echoes and ominous signals succeeding without exhaustion. It’s magnificent stuff, enriched – in the limited edition reviewed here – by another CD (Severed) whose 17 minutes let us savour some of the original sources with which the composer prepared a new painstaking attempt to dissociate our very selves from the junctures of a cheap reality, once more rewardingly.

Intransitive

POLWECHSEL & JOHN TILBURY - Field

For this session, materialized in 2007, Polwechsel comprised two percussionists (Burkhard Beins, Martin Brandlmayr), a saxophonist (John Butcher), strings (Werner Dafeldecker on double bass, Michael Moser on cello) and the hypothetically pivotal figure of John Tilbury, who results instead entirely incorporated in the collective’s sound taken as a whole; his personal incidence is, at times, far from conspicuous if ever valuable.

Immediately after the elapsing of the initial seconds of Michael Moser’s “Place / Replace / Represent”, the first in a brace of extensive pieces, we illusorily believe ourselves to be the ultimate addressees of an essential acoustic report. The music, brilliantly recorded by Martin Leitner and Wolfgang Musil, is in fact executed with undiluted severity bordering on the maniacal, the players focusing on distinct gestures like if they were their last acts on earth, the fastidious care with which every strained note reveals primary harmonics and composite overtones at the basis of a growing sense of inside involvement that places the listener’s seat amidst the performing musicians almost factually. It is not implausible, indeed, to perceive the tiniest human component while attempting to decode the messages; the soft whistle of the air exhaled from someone’s nose is clearly identified in a couple of stiller segments, which makes one imagine tight-lipped absorption and shut eyes in pursuit of a barefooted kind of rightness. In the midst of unmitigated tones, coarse scrapes and impulsive droning clusters, an amazing shade appears for only a few precious instants: it’s a “resonance piano”, namely – in Nina Polaschegg’s words – “a recording of single piano chords played via speakers into the strings of a second grand piano”. A hauntingly gripping presence, whose elusiveness seems to signify an insinuation of declining memory, its sonic worth a critical constituent of this stunning work.

Dafeldecker’s title track is both a direct response to the nearly religious atmosphere of the previous piece and a study on abrupt dynamic shifts, mostly typified by the alternance of straightforward motions in semi-silent environments (in turn characterized by a deeper attention towards the noisy features of the instruments, which get amplified and made resonate for long) and huge clouds of abrasive materials, impressively - and unwillingly - recalling David Jackman’s massively rasping snarls at one point, circa five minutes in. In between, various kinds of oscillations, gliding squeals on metal, a meticulous pondering on the placement of the residual events. Each signal is carefully considered, reciprocal nods useful for the artists’ preparation to the next flood of grittiness. Distinctive voices are in truth discernible – listen, for example, to how Butcher manages to let us hear the sax chirruping acutely, when differentiating cumulative notes and sheer clamour becomes more problematic.

And yet, whatever individual accent a pair of specialist ears might recognize, what lingers on following several days of deep scrutiny of this album is the impression of a communal levitation that, as it often happens, finds its origin in the inhospitable land where the importance of “surpassed” concepts such as timbre, pitch and harmony is secondary, and all that's heard is rendered authoritative by an edifying lack of pretension.

HatOLOGY

DIS.PLAYCE – Habitat

This CD contains 38 minutes extracted from the soundtracks of two cityscape installations: “Ian W.Coel” (Frankfurt) and “Karl Ortmann” (Karlsruhe). I usually approach this kind of record with extreme suspicion, as we’re by now grown used to – and pretty much worn out by – people utilizing field recordings with the purpose of not having a purpose. Take the sounds, place them on record, release it and go on to the next “project”. But Dis.Playce (Maximilian Marcoll and Hannes Seidl) added something that feeds our motivation: composition. The selections comprised by Habitat – whose dedications and intents are explained in detail in the inside leaflet - are interesting in a way that is proportional to the intelligence shown by the assemblers in the logical disposition and crafty merging of the single elements. Although it is a fascinating listen when you raise the playback level, feeling completely encircled by the urban manifestations characterizing both pieces, only through a headset one is able to determine the true value of the compositional endeavor, becoming aware of the many subtleties that the seaming of the different segments reveal. In synthesis, the sonic report functions even when separated by its original raison d’être.

I couldn’t understand if the mesmeric qualities of some of the parts derive from additional processing of the sources, or it’s just a mastery in looping the constituents in such a fashion that the cyclical imageries start generating a slight harmonious aura of their own. But the secret allure of this work lies exactly there, in that – more than sheer environmental gradations – we have the impression of hearing actual music. Entrancingly affecting our psyche, the soundscapes influence the circumstantial reality without the need of recurring to violent impacts (except for a short anarchic section in “Karl Ortmann”) or excessive schizophrenia. All it takes is concentration and wide-open ears, and the reward will soon materialize. Natural or metropolitan, the spirit of these echoes doesn’t matter; what really counts is the gratification that arises from the act of listening. A rare accomplishment in the rapidly expanding universe of self-professing “sound artists”.

Creative Sources

BJ NILSEN – The Invisible City

A distinguished accumulator of field recordings and correlated studio treatments, BJ Nilsen creates music that fluctuates between ephemeral and material, not failing to maintain a vision of the world’s real traits that, in his soundscapes, never cease to elicit interest. The Invisible City – announced by Jon Wozencroft’s routinely impressive photographic cover artwork – is definitely one of the best exemplars of Nilsen’s sound art, a record that could be filed in different departments of a hypothetical archive without erring. Naturally, drones form the basis of most everything. Halfway through crudeness and mortality - touches of more typical instrumental timbres like Hammond organ and guitars wrapped by a veil of strange frequencies, altered animal emanations and processed fumes – this work hardly reveals its fairly indecipherable facets in settings that might be deemed as “static” only by extremely superficial ears.

The majority of the tracks seem to signify an ascension of sorts, from a near-degradation level towards a high pinnacle that, inexorably, remains just conceivable but is not actually reached. We wait for something serious to happen – an explosion of violence, a shaking of our confidence, a breaking of fossilized convictions – yet are left with a mere potential, the intuition of a bigger (and somewhat ominous) impending occurrence. This excludes any tendency to ambient innocuousness: the way in which the sonic events unfold, revealing luminous interstices amidst a general sense of bleakness, furnishes the listener’s mind with the idea of a scrupulous procedure whose results are evidently magnificent and, at worst, perplexingly attractive.

If a slight disapproval, so to speak, exists then it must be directed to the composer’s will of listing, in each piece, every single source from which the action derives. Sometimes it is better to leave judgments and (mostly) errors to the mind's eye, capable of making apparently unrelated elements combine marvelously in a private merging of textural features and implied meanings. Ingested as such, this release offers lots of captivating perceptions to investigate, substantial gratification coming either from sheer contemplation or relatively uneasy involvement.

Touch