Our editors Cheryl Tipp, Patrick Farmer and James Wyness will be participating in the Sound Dairies Symposium at Oxford Brookes University.
More info at Sound Dairies Symposium
Siilo. EERO PULKKINEN, TEEMU ITOLA
(Whitecolors 2013)
Review by David Velez
No matter how funny I find the piece of jewelry attached to the USB unit containing the release data (the screw alone would have been enough), ‘Silo’ is a strong entry to my list of noteworthy works of 2013.
Eero Pulkkinen and Teemu Iltola are Sound Art students from the Art University Helsinki and also part of a the Whitecolors collective who published this release. They contacted this journal to present us this work and from their email I am highlighting the following text:
‘We recorded ‘Siilo’ last summer in Finland. It is recorded from an abandoned chemical-silo/container that we found from the woods near city of Helsinki.’
It’s tough to write about a work that I like so much as this one for the simple fact that anything I could add to it could just help diminish the perceptual formal value of the piece. After repeatedly listening to ‘Silo’ all I can say is that sound is a very powerful emotional matter and Eero Pulkkinen and Teemu Iltola took that into account on this project. The resonances and reverberations that this work presents to the listener point out to an issue of scale and magnitude; the two composers explored, used, performed and recorded this enormous structure capturing some of its essencial formal qualities. Reverberation is a matter of concern for architecture, sculpture and music and as a listener I could describe my experience when listening to ‘Siilo’ as emotionally architectural, sculptural and musical. In this regard there is a very interesting quote by writer Ken Kesey from ‘Sometimes a Great Notion’:
‘The reverberation often exceeds through silence the sound that sets it off; the reaction occasionally outdoes by way of repose the event that stimulated it; and the past not uncommonly takes a while to happen, and some long time to figure out.’
The deaf, raw and crude sounds in ‘Siilo’ appear to be mostly derived from silent and quiet events -with the exception of the sound of an airplane making its appearance through the end of the 2nd third- but the magnitude of the environment where these events resonate scales them up to a point where the listener is immersed in an overwhelming and sublime experience where he is confronted by something of unfathomable scale.
The silo itself works as some kind of enormous instrument being played by incidental forces and probably in some extend by Eero Pulkkinen and Teemu Iltola as well; the result of this exploration offers a very rewarding experience for the listener in terms of the emotional sense of form and space that it develops throughout 50 minutes of something I’d call ‘screaming architecture’.
If there has been a work that recently impressed me in the acousmatic composition line that would be ‘Siilo’: it shows me that there is plenty of room for new approaches and fresh results in the practice when the homework gets properly done. I believe effective and successful compositions come from a certain level of rigor and imagination in the methodology of the creative process as it clearly happens with ‘Siilo’
The bad news is that the release it out of stock but I hope the Whitecolors guys come up with something: this composition is a must listen.
[Eero Pulkkinen, Teemu Iltola]
Unheard Kyoto / Unheard Tokyo. JASON KAHN
(radio broadcast 2013)
Review by David Vélez
From the liner notes:
‘Unheard Tokyo and Unheard Kyoto are two installments in the ongoing series Unheard Cities where I investigate the acoustics of social space by interviewing residents of large cities with the question, What is your favorite sound or sound atmosphere in your city?‘
‘The answers to this question not only reflect how people think and feel about their environment but take me on a search through the city in search of the favorite sounds. Each interview is recorded in the person’s native language and then the sounds are found — in some cases not — and also recorded.’
Although the premise of ‘favorite’ it’s a bit naive and vague, I think it is a very nice excuse to establish a poetic method to start a quest for sounds and explore the emotional relation that people have with their acoustic environments. Likewise ‘favorite’ probably allows for the interviewees to easily come up with a concrete answer.
The resident’s descriptions of their favorite sounds are featured on the piece and, as one might have guessed, they are mostly in Japanese. From a a non-Japanese speaker perspective this is interesting as we are listening stories we don’t understand but we still try to figure them out by guessing from some acoustic aspects and cues of the verbal communication. It’s content made form by our lack of understanding of a certain language.
Anyway what is interesting here is what kind sounds and acoustic situations and environments these people do consider enjoyable, interesting, pleasant, meaningful…favorite.
There are sounds of cicadas and a television program playing (my personal favorite) that transport me to a imaginary situations that are still linked with the original situation thanks to the capacity of sound to imprint a situation and project it on the listener’s perception: resonances and reverberations reflecting their causality in our imagination.
The variety of sounds here is large, from kids playing in a playground to the sound of cicadas -which are very important and recurrent in Japanese culture-; from sounds of what seems like a train station to sounds of a musical presentation / rehearsal. Many sounds cited by many people that present a very nice listen and that allow us to acousmatically visit the places whose sonorities are meaningful for the people interviewed by Kahn.
Some of the sounds here probably refer to very personal and concrete situations whose story behind we are missing for not speaking Japanese. Anyway -like I mentioned before- listening to people in a language we don’t understand makes us to imagine and intuite. We can make up stories, we are now using our imagination in a syntactic and symbolic -and still purely emotional- sense, which for me is quite beautiful whether it was the purpose of Kahn or whether he otherwise assumed that we all do or should speak Japanese.
A remarkable aspect here is that Kahn didn’t choose the sounds but otherwise he is allowing for the sounds to find him and have him recording them. In this work he implemented a method where the role of the phonographic documentalist suffers a beautiful variation having external people and their emotional experiences involved in the creative process.
‘Unheard Kyoto / Unheard Tokyo’ is a work that worths the two hour listen and that in addition presents beautiful questions in regard of the role of the sound documentalist and his research process.
[Jason Kahn courtesy of Philadelphia Sound Forum]
40:43. MECHA / ORGA -Yiorgis Sakellariou-
(OtO 2013)
Review by Maria Papadomanolaki
Four untitled tracks, stripped down to their bare essential: time. The beautifully packaged edition comes with abstract black and white images by 0t0 label’s owner Takanobu Hoshino. While reading a recent self-reflective text that Yiorgis Sakelariou wrote for an online Greek resource, I stumbled upon his concept of the symbiosis/balance between the sound of the Mechanical and the Organic. This is the root-territory for his Mecha/Orga outlet; a field that has no particular references to the visual or the symbolic. It is up to the listener to bridge all the gaps in a condition of alert, curiosity and creativity, as he stated in another interview for kulturterrorismus.de. The importance of a meticulous yet raw in its substance approach remains a consistent prerequisite in Yiorgis’s 10 year trajectory in the exploration of sound. 40:43 is another faithful rendition of such a query. Recorded between August 2012 and January 2013 in various locations in London and Athens, the album begins to unfold through an odd marriage of distant airplane traffic, bonfire impressions and mechanical nigh time insects swarming inside a rising lava of burning noise (Track 1). The structuring of time and most importantly the interchange of dynamics, the abrupt change from loud to quiet is a recurring theme in 40:43 and it expresses itself through the unravelling of familiar yet unidentifiable sonic textures and timbres.
I listen to Track 2 on the album and I find myself contemplating on the element of air and how it moves in and out of atmospheres, how it is being transformed from a background breeze to a rumbling, to a vent. I challenge myself to decipher all these that sound possible to my ears, that have a meaning and an essence. Air then is transposed in track 3 to the pumping heart of a machine, setting its arteries in motion, flooding, self-expanding to the ears of the listener, cryptic and alerting, devastating. The valves are exhaling mid-way to abruptly give way to reconciliation with a more silent, understated motion. Air is still there, bringing to life the presence of sonic windowpanes and darkened views beyond the tactile and the visual. It now has rendered itself into a whisper, a breeze again, a mercurial palindrome of sorts. Yiorgi’s understanding of progression and structure is attuned to a subtle taste for the dramatic. It echoes a certain degree of mystery and exposes the listener to a world that flickers between the intangible and the deeply stochastic. Track 4 plays with the omnipresence of the mechanical inside a fluid stage of echoing disturbances. Falling pipes are set against a troglodyte drumming tuning the listener’s ear in synch. This agitated hermetic universe is swallowed by the dead air of silence.
Regardless of what I may write in this review, there is not one listening position in 40:43. I am not aiming to point towards external references, quotes or philosophies in support of this assumption. I choose to follow Yiorgi’s paradigm and leave it self-referential, sincerely ingrained within its own limitations, organic, mechanically moved by a stream of words meticulously picked yet perhaps at times inaccessible and with varying levels of intensity or simplicity; a balancing act between the barrier posed by the concreteness of the sounds and the intimacy of the listening ear with all its loopholes, memories and associative mechanisms, open and obscured.
[Yiorgis Sakellariou]
The great silence. JAY-DEA LOPEZ
(3Leaves 2013)
Review by David Vélez
‘…deathlike, dismal, gloomy and appalling…’
These are words used by British colonialists to describe the sounds of Australia in the 18th century as it can be read on the release’s liner notes. ‘The great silence’ is a composition by Jay-Dea Lopez based on sounds he captured on Australia -where he lives- and that is published by 3Leaves.
After some listening I could guess that Jay-Dea Lopez did some substantial editing and layering to his untreated recordings but I might be wrong. Anyway sometimes I care more about the environment I perceptually create rather that about the environments he might have originally recorded. At certain point point with phonographic-based composition I formally treasure the myth over the fact.
‘The great silence’ is of one of the most fortunate releases of its kind of the year and one of the reasons of its success is how it manages to create a really strong and effective emotional sense of tension in every moment and throughout the entire piece. I refereed to this once as ‘compositional coordinates’: one established by the illusion of depth and another established by the illusion of change that links punctual events on a timeline; in this composition Jay-Dea Lopez exhibits a very complete understanding of both coordinates making this work not only deep in the singularity of every moment but deep as an emotional universal structure.
Time -just like sound- is intangible: we can’t grab it or even see it…all we can see or grab is its imprint, the emptiness it leaves. From skin wrinkles to metal rust we only can see what time does to objectual visible things, but time itself is nowhere to be seen.
But why I talk about time while reviewing ‘The great silence’?
Because I believe that acousmatic composition (in this particular case phonographic composition) is the essential art / musical practice when we are creatively and objectively interested in the emotional aspect of time perception. The invisible, intangible and mysterious nature of sound reflects like no other media the equally mysterious nature of time because it reflects it in its own invisibility and mystery; in this regard Jay-Dea Lopez presents us a time that is dark and somber, a time of doom where the presence of a future catastrophe is subjacent on every single moment as it happens on nature.
‘Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.’
-Susan Sontag
Phonographic composition that includes edition, layering but no treatment makes use of documentation (of traces from reality) to create a fictional narrative, a fictional story that is strongly believable because its ‘pitch’ is natural and is perceived as real. To pitch up/down or not to is a very important decision that have strong repercussions on the finalized work; in this case the use of a natural pitch puts the composition on a context where the sound object that the listener could perceptually create is still subtly linked to its causality which helps creating a stronger emotional sense of location.
The deathlike, dismal, gloomy and appalling aspects that the colonialists described is present throughout the release and it also can be found in other Jay-Dea works that by no coincidence were also composed with environmental sounds from wildlife Australia. In a way his work reminds me of Werner Herzog’s movies ‘Aguirre, the wrath of God’ and ‘Fitzcarraldo’ where nature is seen as something menacing, haunting and merciless. On Lopez’ work the environmentalist moral discourse presented by many phonographic releases where nature is seen as weak and vulnerable when confronted by men is replaced by an actual sense of respect and fear imposed by the way nature sounds like. This is a nature that not only resists human progress, but a nature that eventually could prevail and corrode the structures of human progress.
‘The great silence’ is a work to be reckoned with in the crowded world of phonographic composition.
[Jay-Dea Lopez]
Unrelated causalities.
TROPIC OF COLDNESS
(self release 2013)
Review by Flavien Gillié
L’enluminure leur va si bien.
Unrelated causalities est le deuxième album de Tropic of Coldness, après le déjà apprécié Commuting sort en 2012. C’est un duo, rencontre entre deux musiciens ayant déjà un passé actif dans diverses formations, Drawing Virtual Gardens pour David qui avait déjà retenu notre attention précédemment et Fuji Apple Worship en groupe pour Giovanni.
Tout part souvent d’une boucle, un enregistrement de terrain qui se répète, puis disparait. Des ambiances de rue dans une ville sans voiture, le glissement des mains sur le magnétophone. Les deux membres de Tropic of Coldness étirent les cordes de leurs guitares, viennent jouer avec l’ambiance, on pense à Robert Fripp, aux premiers albums de Labradford, c’est un compliment. Ce deuxième album confirme leur maitrise dans la retenue.
Le point culminant est sur Nourishing Skills With Discipline, où les guitares semblent tout emporter avant de s’assagir dans une descente en delays, et les enregistrements de terrain nous reviennent tandis que les derniers échos des étirements de cordes disparaissent, avec une grande sérénité.
Il y a de la solitude mais elle n’est jamais pesante, on se met dans la peau d’un touriste bien accueilli, on ne parle pas forcément le langage de la population mais on sait qu’ils ont envers nous des paroles bienveillantes. On s’incline alors vers la possible rencontre, en résonance, comme les cordes des guitares.
[ David and Giovanni from Tropic of Coldness,
photo courtesy of Klubmoozak]
Translation to English -by Sismophone-
Illumination suits them so well.
“Unrelated causalities” is the second album by Tropic of Coldness, after the hailed “Commuting” released in 2012. It is a duet, the meeting of two already busy musicians among various groups, Drawing Virtual Gardens for David that already caught our attention, and Fuji Apple Worship for Giovanni.
It often starts from a loop, a field recording repeating, then vanishing. Street ambiences in a car-free city, sliding hands on a tape-recorder. The two members of Tropic of Coldness stretch their guitars strings, play with the mood, one recalls Robert Fripp, the first Labradford releases, this is a praise. This second album confirms their art of restraint.
The climax is in “Nourishing Skills With Discipline”, where guitars seem to devastate all on their way before to quieten down in an abyss of delays, then field recordings appear again while the last faint echoes of stretched strings vanish, in a peaceful serenity.
There is loneliness but never burdensome, one walks in the shoes of a warmly welcomed tourist, one does not really speak the autochtones language but we know their words towards us are the kindest. One then bends down to the possible encounter, resonating like the guitar string.
Eolo. ANDREAS BICK
(Galaverna 2013)
Review by Cheryl Tipp
A clue to the contents of Andreas Bick’s recent release on Galaverna can be found in the title ‘Eolo’, the Italian name for Aeolus, the ruler of the winds in Greek mythology. The work consists of two parts; an audio only piece and a video work. Both draw inspiration and indeed content from the trade winds that pass over the volcanic island of La Palma, situated in the Canary Islands archipelago, which Bick visited towards the end of 2010.
The audio only element of ‘Eolo’ combines field recordings with the haunting vocals of German singer Almut Kühne. While the voice of Kühne remains a fairly constant aspect of the four and a half minute composition, the presence of wind is more transient, with recordings almost naturally moving in and out of the piece. This similarity to the changeable nature of wind can only be deliberate and is a thoughtful touch.
The accompanying video takes this composition and applies it to footage gathered by Bick over a two week period in the autumn of 2010. While the audio only version is pleasant to listen to, it is by no means exceptional. In my opinion the work really shines when the two elements of sound and moving image come together. ‘Eolo’ as an audiovisual work is strikingly beautiful; the time-lapse recordings have been edited to create a highly attractive short film that seems almost surreal at times. It is with this coming together of the visual and the acoustic that the spirit of Eolo is truly invoked.
With just over a year and five releases under their belt, Galaverna is in a perfect position to experiment, diversify and not be tied down to a particular style. It will be interesting to see what road this exciting label decides to take.
[Andreas Bick]
