Island Terminus. ADRIAN DZIEWANSKI
(Gruenrekorder 2013)

Review by Caity Kerr

Adrian Dziewanski is a Vancouver based sound artist who, in his own words, ‘believes in the potency and poetry of musical happenstance and advocates for the benefits of active listening’.

Island Terminus [44:32] (2012), released on Gruenrekorder’s digital label, is a two-track album. Extensive sleeve notes can be had here. In offering some background to your listening experience I should mention that Dziewanski suffers from tinnitus, which he describes as a ‘musical hallucination’. In Island Terminus he decided to work with this affliction on a conscious level, channelling the phenomenon through his practice. Secondly you might like to know that the audio was culled from recordings made of three separate ferry voyages through the coastal waters of British Columbia, which included a number of stops at various ports along the way.

Paraphrasing the sleeve notes the first track [21:51] is more contextualized, showcasing a narrative of sea travel along the British Columbia coast. Track two [22:41] better captures the heart of the musical hallucination.

Track 1 is a full and rich broadband soundscape in which no attempt is made to reduce the sonic power of the machine-made sounds. Importantly, the basic compositional techniques of this kind of work are well represented: transitions and crossfades with corresponding shifts of register, a relaxed pace, perhaps reflecting the fact that in ferry travel you can’t exactly get off the boat in a hurry. I would point out also the effective juxtaposition of abstract(ed) sections with more straightforward ‘realistic’ representational passages. Having listened to dozens of works like this I often suffer from listening fatigue because of an over-abundance of broadband energy, flavoured and coloured of course by whatever microphones and devices are in use at the business end. Adrian Dziewanski overcomes this potential problem, only up to a point, by combining shorter sections of material, varying the spectrum and reducing the threat of full broadband sonic onslaught which, in addition to tiring out my ears, can often be timbrally or morphologically uninteresting and/or unmusical. The trick here, and Dziewanski is on to it, is to make the piece appealing by using basic and time-honoured musical techniques – obvious but often overlooked by composers who get too close to their material.

Another effective device is the use of the appearance of the ship’s horn to punctuate the narrative. This struck me as emotionally evocative, similar in many ways to bells and carrying by extension the notion of people calling to each other over distances, mediated by technology. There are however no voices, though there are many hints at human agency.

The piece flags a tiny bit in the last third but the raw material would challenge most people. I’d say it’s very well handled in the end. The last three minutes are classically acousmatic, offering us a distinctive banging sound, perhaps as the ferry draws into port.

Track 2 takes us into a long slow crescendo up to around 10’, gathering energy across the full bandwidth, though with a perceptible high frequency peak which perhaps alludes to the ‘musical hallucination’. There is no lack of detail in the middle of all this: watery sounds, machine drones, fluctuating clatters and bangs – the full works. And never too harsh as there’s probably some kind of filtering at work to take off the rough edges, though again the full bandwidth is tiring over the course of the piece. Something I like do in listening to this kind of work is to stop and start playback at various points to test for the full-on whooshing sound which causes the ear fatigue. I’d add to this the habit of walking in and out of the listening room to figure out if I’ve missed anything or if anything has moved on.

An interesting project would be to consider how far these kinds of pieces resemble each other across a range of individual compositions, gathered under ‘field recording’ or ‘phonography’. Furthermore, setting aside the composer’s intentions for a moment, we might ask if this is a document of what could (by some) be construed as a fairly uninteresting sonic experience – the documentation being the interesting part. Or we might ask to what degree the composer has transformed and arranged the material to make it interesting.

Overall, if you like what is becoming a classic kind of soundscape experience, this is a good one in many respects, and represents the emerging idiom very well.

[Adrian Dziewanski]

Adrian Dziewanski website
Gruenrekorder website

It just ain’t flapping. VA AA LR
-Vasco Alves, Adam Asnan and Louie Rice-
(Consumer Waste 2013)

Review by Patrick Farmer

Finally! Hallelujah! Eureka! Top Horn! An album I can truly enjoy for no reason at all. It just ain’t flapping is at its very best, which really is a height to summit, a geography of misleading proportion. With eyes shut you could be listening for miles, with eyes open, what’s heard remains entrenched underneath the listening foot. There is so much here to play with, and I’ll keep coming back to it until it’s even more raggedy-ass than it already is. Though I have to ask, what’s the point of trying to describe this album whilst I’m enjoying it so much? I feel the question, in a way, is the best description I can proffer. As the CD hops from the speaker cones into the room I ask you to picture the marks on my jubilant face as I encounter over and over such a frisky and unique trio of artists that leave me thinking, fuck, I need to recover my sense of urgency.

[VA AA LR]

VA AA LR website
Vasco Alves website
Adam Asnan website
Louie Rice website
Consumer Waste website

Flourish. NICK HENNIES
(Consumer Waste 2013)

Review by Patrick Farmer

An admirable display of discipline
- Canto 1. The most beautiful clock I’ve ever heard.

in which one can almost hear Hennies’ teeth clench,
- Canto 2. Like a cold cup of coffee and a slice of watermelon. 

behind which, one can almost see the speechless King of Denmark,
- Canto 3. I stop listening and wait for a curve.  

the mercurial and singular figure sat on stage, under the prospering wings of flowers,
- Canto 4. A bright complexion, a Polaroid of difficult decision and chemical process.

flourish is the evolving shimmer as he drops inflorescence architecture onto the bars below,
- Canto 5. The hunched and intense craft of eyes that never blink.

flourish is Hennies’ work getting even lighter.
- Canto 6. Everything heads straight up. 

[Nick Hennies; photo courtesy of L'innomable]

Nick Hennies website
Consumer Waste website

Niche constructions. THOMAS BESLEY
(Impulsive Habitat 2013)

Review by Cheryl Tipp

There’s little wonder why field recordists choose to visit Madagascar. Cloaked in an air of exoticism and full of intriguing species that can be found nowhere else on Earth, Madagascar would be near the top of anybody’s wishlist. Even the very names of the animals that inhabit the island lure you in: Helmet Vanga, Indri, White-throated Oxylabes, Diademed Sifaka, Sakalava Rail and the Nelicourvi Weaver. What are these mysterious creatures, what do they look like and, more importantly, sound like?

Thomas Besley has taken binaural recordings made during a trip to this island country lying in the Indian Ocean and created a beautiful 38 minute composition that is tranquil, engaging and full of surprises. In the accompanying notes, Besley writes that he wanted to give an impression of the different habitats through which he passed. He certainly achieves this and yet the transitions are not overly obvious or distracting.

If I had to choose one word to describe ‘Niche Constructions’, that word would be serene. Though there are occasional pockets of heightened vocal activity, the overall feel is quite gentle. If you had been lulled into a state of relaxation however, the unexpected rampant calls of a group of Red-ruffed lemurs towards the end of the piece will definitely change that!

As with David Michael’s ‘El Yunque’ (Impulsive Habitat) and Rodolphe Alexis’ ‘Sempervirent’ (Gruenrekorder), Besley has not been tempted to create a formulaic “rainforest” atmosphere, if such a thing even exists. What I mean is, there has been no attempt to create a sonically diverse soundscape just because that is how many people assume a rainforest would sound.

Species heard during the course of the composition are listed in the booklet, which also contains a series of photographs that make you just want to pack your bags and head straight there. What strikes the reader on browsing this species inventory is that most of the animals heard are under threat. Two – the Black and White Ruffed Lemur and the Silky Sifaka – are critically endangered. The experience of listening to these voices is thus tinged with poignancy; will these animals and those who are battling to save them from extinction be successful or will we eventually only be able to hear their calls through the medium of recorded sound. Possibly one of the saddest things I’ve read in a long time is Besley’s reference to a recording which didn’t make it onto the release – recordings of the endangered Golden-crowned Sifaka calling out for his lost mate above the sound of artisan miners who uproot trees and clear bushland as they pan for gold. I feel these recordings need to be heard, maybe not on this platform, but somewhere – could there be a more emotive way to highlight the plight of these persecuted species?

‘Niche Constructions’ sits well alongside previous releases from Impulsive Habitat. As always the listener is treated to a well composed piece that can be both enjoyable to listen to and thought provoking at the same time. This is just one of the reasons why Impulsive Habitat is one of the most respected and prolific netlabels out there.

[Thomas Besley; photo courtesy of Radio Academy]

Thomas Besley website
Impulsive Habitat website

tʃɔːk – eight studies of hearing loss. SEBASTIANE HEGARTY
(Very Quiet 2013)

Review by Jay-Dea Lopez

What is the audibility of loss? This is the central question driving Sebastiane Hegarty’s latest series of recordings released under the title “tʃɔːk: eight studies of hearing loss”. The pieces presented by Hegarty might seem quite simplistic upon first listening, chalk retrieved from various locations is recorded as it pops and crackles in a vinegar solution, yet the process driving the recordings is one filled with poetic intent. Listening closely to these miniature sounds we are instilled with a renewed sense of wonder towards the ephemeral relationship between sound and time, the process of field-recording forging an auditory bridge to earth’s Paleolithic past.

The physical subject of Hegarty’s recordings is chalk, a substance composed of compressed fragments of microscopic organisms that once swam in earth’s prehistoric oceans. Hegarty uses chalk sourced from Argentina, England, France, and Madagascar with specimens dating from the late Jurassic to Late Cretaceous periods. As we listen to Hegarty’s chalk recordings we become immersed in our distant past. We eavesdrop into an era when dinosaurs ruled the earth. The crackle and pop of air escaping from chalk in the vinegar solution echoes this ancient biological past. Other recordings of chalk from the late Cretaceous period signal a distinct change in earth’s evolution – with global cooling dinosaurs had largely become extinct, new species of plants and animals were coming into existence and continents were continuing to drift apart. As we listen to this era of mass extinction we wonder about our own future.

There is something very precious, indeed spellbinding, in listening to these recordings. In his notes about the process Hegarty says “The white static noise released as chalk fragments dissolve, offers up an acoustic shell to our ear, through which we can hear the decaying Geiger roar of deceased seas … There is something supernatural in this alchemical transformation of solid matter into effervescent air. This movement from stillness into sound, reminiscent of Ariel’s escape from substance in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: a voice and song set free to ‘take the ear strangely’”. And so it is. Hegarty’s recordings connect us to something much greater than ourselves. In this sense “tʃɔːk: eight studies of hearing loss” is a profound listening experience.

[Sebastiane Hegarty; photo courtesy of WEC]

Sebastiane Hegarty website
Very Quiet website

Shards Of Splinters – Fragments Of Scratches /
Killustiku Killud – Kriimude Killud.
TARAB -Eamon Sprod-
(Semperflorens 2012)

Review by Daniel Crokaert

Actuator of sonorities & tireless surveyor, Eamon Sprod (Tarab) goes through his environment on the permanent alert, on the watch for sound potentialities, meeting things as if they were fragments of a story in a continual state of flux, and in which he wants to involve us…

This very meticulous, invested, last-ditcher approach is the foundation of a detailed and filmic composition where one feels no joins…

As the eye of the good photographer catching a particular light, a flicker or executing a singular framing, Eamon’s ears record the contrasts, the textures, anticipating the interaction of the materials…
In a step integral with Arte Povera, he takes the time to settle in front of the scraps, the waste thrown out by our consumption society, and integrates them into his creation process, giving them a new boost, a poetic force…

Traces collection, work of memory preservation, but also plays with the in situ found elements, quest for underlying connections, aesthetics of the quotidian…

“Shards of Splinters – Fragments of Scratches/ Killustiku Killud – Kriimude Killud” draws from sounds garnered during a residency at MoKS in Estonia…These, laced with others, drifted from Felicity Mangan’s & John Grzinich’s practices have been de-rushed, then long matured over a period of 3 years, and remounted according to their intrinsic affinities in three pieces forming a soundscape that is listened to like a walk into the unknown…

The first steeped in currents, and a rural respiration extricates itself from the vegetable to give birth to a rough drone, offspring of metallic scrapings against stone, and of surfaces contact…then shifts to a reverie fed by the intertwining of different planes : a few muffled voices, bird calls, some barking, the own gestures of the field recordist… maybe a bark which creaks under Aeolus’action, an old seized up roundabout…after a short gap, the second piece is another wind tale…the debris are activated…one hears chirpings, the emergence of a motor roaring…the air spreads, but seems suspended…the third sequence begins on the stirring of pebbles, glass, ceramic pieces, the echo of an hollow space filled with liquid and brought to life by a projectile…again, a purring drone, then the resonances of a metal tube dragged on the ground…in its centre, a deflagration as starting point of a multitude of other lines…all in all, an orchestration of the matter…

Tarab’s work takes shape from asperities, collisions, all erosion shown off…not a lot of peace, or tepid sweetness in this world ceaselessly on the edge…More of a constant lucidity, the hunt for the sudden burst, a way of educating us to perceive, discern the splendour in the immediate torn background…“Shards of Splinters – Fragments of Scratches/ Killustiku Killud – Kriimude Killud” claws us, unfolding under its raw appearances a profound ode to space & time…

Largely beyond field recordings as pure documentation,here, their remelt in a multifaceted vibrant composition propels us in a grid, magnified territory, bearer of hope of which we become the actors ourselves…

[Eamon Sprod courtesy of Forepaw]

- Translation to French-

Déclencheur de sonorités et arpenteur inlassable, Eamon Sprod (Tarab) traverse son environnement en alerte permanente, à l’affût des potentialités sonores, à la rencontre des choses, comme s’ils s’agissaient de fragments d’une histoire en devenir, et dans laquelle il veut nous impliquer..Cette approche investie, minutieuse, jusqu’au boutiste est la fondation d’une composition fouillée et filmique où jamais on ne sent les raccords…

Tout comme l’oeil du bon photographe capturant une lumière particulière, un éclat, ou effectuant un cadrage singulier, l’oreille d’Eamon consigne les contrastes, les textures, anticipe l’interaction des matériaux…Dans une démarche solidaire de l’Arte Povera, il prend le temps de se poser devant les rebuts, les matières rejetées par notre société de consommation, et les intègre à son processus de création leur prêtant un nouvel élan, une force poétique…

Relevé de traces, travail de préservation de la mémoire, mais aussi jeux avec les éléments in situ, recherche de liens sous-jacents, d’une esthétique du quotidien…

“Shards of Splinters – Fragments of Scratches/ Killustiku Killud – Kriimude Killud” puise ici dans les sons récoltés lors d’une résidence au MoKS en Estonie…ces sons, additionnés d’autres dérivés des pratiques de Felicity Mangan et de John Grzinich, ont été dérushés, puis longuement mûris sur une période de trois ans et remontés en fonction de leurs affinités intrinsèques en trois pièces formant une composition qui s’écoute comme une promenade dans l’inconnu…

La première pétrie de courants et d’une respiration champêtre s’extirpe du végétal pour donner naissance à un drone rugueux, fruit de raclements de métal sur de la pierre, et du contact des surfaces…puis bascule dans une rêverie nourrie par l’entrelacement de différents plans : des voix, des appels d’oiseaux, quelques aboiements, les gestes mêmes du preneur de sons…peut-être une écorce qui grince sous l’action du dieu Eole, le tournis d’un vieux carousel grippé…après une courte césure, la deuxième pièce conte encore le vent…les débris sont activés…on entend des pépiements, ensuite l’émergence d’un vrombissement de moteur…l’air colporte, mais semble comme suspendu…

La troisième séquence embraye sur le remuage de cailloux, de morceaux de verre, de céramique, l’écho d’un espace creux rempli de liquide et activé par un projectile…de nouveau un drone ronronnant, puis les résonances d’un tube métallique traîné sur le sol…en son centre, une déflagration comme point de départ d’une multitude d’autres lignes…en fin de compte une orchestration de la matière…

L’oeuvre de Tarab prend forme à partir des aspérités, des collisions, toute érosion exhibée…peu de quiétude, ou de tiède douceur dans ce monde sans cesse sur le fil…plutôt une lucidité de tous les instants, la poursuite du sursaut, une façon de nous éduquer à percevoir, à discerner la splendeur dans le décor déchiré immédiat…

“Shards of Splinters – Fragments of Scratches/ Killustiku Killud – Kriimude Killud”nous griffe, déroulant sous ses allures brutes une ode profonde à l’espace et au temps…

Bien au-delà de field recordings comme pure documentation, ici, leur refonte nous propulse dans un territoire quadrillé, magnifié, porteur d’espérance, dont nous devenons nous mêmes les acteurs…

Eamon Sprod website
Semperflorens website

Decentering. RICHARD GARET
(Sourdine 2011)

Review by Caity Kerr

Although it’s hard to find anything much about the work online apart from a few snippets (like this) I can tell you that Richard Garet is a well known US based artist, actually Uruguayan by birth, whose website has very small text in lower case and is low on redundant information. All this presents an interesting aesthetic contrast with (and is possibly at odds with) the work ‘Decentering’, which is very textured, full, maximal as opposed to minimal, noisy, loud and shouty.

Garet has recently been selected to appear at The Museum of Modern Art’s first major exhibition of sound art, Soundings: A Contemporary Score showing from August – November 2013. The Field Reporter would like to congratulate him on his selection and to wish him every success.

Moving on to the work and to the review, personally I find textured music to be more interesting than simply constructed linear gestural music. This is because of the opportunities afforded by textural music to investigate complexity which I believe to be an important and exciting aspect of contemporary music. So I enjoyed the opening – a slow modulating accumulating texture, largely electronic sounding, with a prominent almost-pitched peak, gathering up higher sines and iterative textures in the high frequency range – little spikes that come and go. The music began to give the impression of defying linearity, another important attribute in my view, and of creating a complex evolving mass that might sit between the loudspeakers (or in your head) as opposed to marking clock time. There are very few artists who have the inclination, nerve (or is it skill?) to keep this kind of tension and intensity alive for more than a relatively short period. The spell is often broken, to the detriment of the music. I’m not talking about relieving boredom, unless the artist him/herself becomes bored which is another thing entirely.

So instead of keeping the promising opening few minutes alive in an organic sense as it were, slowly and morphogenetically, we have, to my ears at least, a much simpler routine of taking away from the mass and then adding something else. This seems to be the way in a lot of composition, possibly a result of the architecture of digital composition tools and a lingering post-dance aesthetic. The sounds then become more predictable – (rhythmic) iterative noisy bumps and waveforms which seem to gatecrash the party.

Finally, somewhat predictably though nonetheless welcome with all this high frequency activity, the machine-like arrival of the low-end crescendo. I’d point also to the fact that there’s just enough interest in the linearity of various small compositional intrusions but less interest in some of the obviously lo-fi electronic sounds. It’s when you don’t feel ‘the hand of the composer’ that things work best, when the music seems effortlessly to create its own internal dynamics and give birth to new forms.

At fifty minutes, ‘Decentering’ is a long piece, perhaps too long, and given the range of sounds it might even benefit from being split into several works. The trick with these lengthy pieces lies in sustaining interest at this length without presenting a succession of new but seemingly unrelated sounds. If these new sounds come out of nowhere, then an element of sci-fi narrative enters in, for example at around the 20’ mark. However, if the music evolves and/or mutates slowly according to some kind of inner drive, force or even bio-logic we’re in business. Xenakis had some good ideas in this respect.

To summarise, Garet gets a good head of steam going with respect to texture and sets out some exciting material along the borderline between electronic and environmental sound. After that one could argue that he does too much – some hackneyed and incongruous sounds poke their noses in later, as if he’s fed up. I also wondered about a couple of odd cuts/dropouts, for example at 33:07, which broke up the flow, suggesting a possible dodgy edit. To be fair he does tackle the thorny problem of taking a musical rest more or less successfully, drawing breath from time to time, for example between 37 and 40 minutes.

The work then is a noise investigation pinned down by iterative layers within various frequency bands which (just) hold the piece together, finishing with much the same texture as it started.

Not many people have succeeded entirely in doing what I think Richard Garet is setting out to do, so by any standards this is a very fine effort and at best I’d like to think of this kind of project as always in-progress. My criticisms are based on a feeling that the best in this kind of music a) shouldn’t expect to be ‘perfect’ in the sense of a finely honed piece from the classical era or in the sense of a big production pop song and b) will always be experimental in the sense of never being sure of its success. This kind of work, again only my opinion, represents the cutting edge in contemporary composition and has to be worked out, as with good free improvisation. At worst (and certainly not the case here) it collapses into evasiveness and hackneyed gestural activity. At its very best we feel the music evolve, multi-sensorially, above and beyond the listening.

[Richard Garet]

Richard Garet website
Sourdine website

The Field Reporter Radio #18
‘Mixed field recordings from the Brussels Soundmap’
by Flavien Gillié

Download ‘Mixed field recordings from the Brussels Soundmap’

Murmur. ATILIO DORESTE
(Very Quiet 2013)

Review by Chris Whitehead

The dérive  as envisaged by Guy Debord is not a meaningless wander governed by chance. It is directed by decisions made by the participant who chooses the route according to psychogeographical currents, whatever they might be. Originally particularly appropriate to urban environments with clear lines of movement and directions of flow, the derivé is a technique of discovery that can seemingly be adapted to many situations.

This is a download release under the Very Quiet Records imprint, a label that has devoted itself to intriguing and varied explorations of low volume listening. Murmer is by no means the quietest of their catalogue. Others have focused on the sound of a freezing microphone or the arid, unpopulated desert of Australia for example, but Doreste’s recordings are of the lush, breathing forests of Tenerife.

Forever the wind is the primary motif. Birds call and hinges creak, we travel with Doreste across the terrain and our ears meet new atmospheres, but all within this universe of air which permeates everything. I am reminded of Andrei Tarkovsy’s film Mirror: A progressive wave disturbs the crops and moves through the field as a portent or natural manifestation of psychological change. Wind cannot be seen, but it reveals itself by reacting with physical objects: Trees, twigs, leaves which it brushes past like a ghost.

The climate of the Canary Islands is moderated by these north easterly trade winds, known locally by the name Alisios. They, together with the cool Canary current, maintain a comfortable temperature a few degrees lower than might be expected at the latitude. This lack of extremes allows many micro-climates to coexist, and the dérives employed here move through soundscapes as a visitor might move through the rooms of a large house.

Atilio Doreste pulls away from the traffic of the island and into the forest beneath the gently whispering leaves. The sound from the road peters out and we enter a new place, as if beneath a surface and enveloped by moving air, a tide of wind ebbs and flows and Doreste breathes heavily as the effort of his derive becomes apparent. By not erasing the sound of his footsteps, the clink and clatter of equipment and the unzipping of garments or other pieces of kit, the artist is placing himself in the landscape audibly and without apology. In his words ‘I accept my own impact on the site and reveal the reality of the creative process’.

By its very nature this method relies on physical movement, climbing, walking, breathing, direction, reaction, motion. The recordist is the conduit through which the subtle events that determine the pattern of the drift are filtered, therefore to leave him out of the finished edit would be disingenuous.

There are two tracks here, each one around 15 minutes in length. the first from Anaga Natural Park and the second from Meriga Dam, La Gomera. Listening to these honest, pure recordings has a cleansing effect leaving a cooling, invigorating impression. As Atilio Doreste says, ‘We choose and create the boundaries of our sonic environment’.

[Atilio Doreste]

Atilio Doreste website
Very Quiet website

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