125

 

Insecta. JEPH JERMAN & FIVE ELEMENTS MUSIC
(Still * Sleep 2011)

Jeph Jerman has a personal conception of what listening is shaped over the years & performances, and at the same time he maintains a very intimate relation with his environment, nature, matters and objects…here he shares his approach with Five Elements Music’s one, an other eulogist of the organic…

The result of this common gestation is a detour via a world sheltered from sight and governed by its own rules…

“Insecta” doesn’t pretend to be a scientific transcription or observation, but more of a poetic narration, a narration brought up on the wanderings of our imaginary where prevails form expressiveness and suggestive force…and paradoxically enough, the real seems better defined that way…

“Insecta” gives us to hear stridulations and buzzings, mandibles noises, the whole slowed down, mutated, rechoreographed around a driving its own progress framework…

The processed phonographies for their main part illustrate insectoid signal & behaviour through their variable habitat set against a background of bark murmurs & cracks, scrape on stones, smell of tepid humus, thin stream, other animal presence…

Each sound being an extra stroke on an elusive canvas with muddy tones…the gradual development of a topography of the unfathomable…

It consists in an high-flying exploration revolving around the shift, the inner feelings, the perception of the tenuous…like an incursion on tiptoe in an opaque sylvan zone…a vision through the other end of the telescope, a glow shed on the act of metamorphosis, the impermanence, and above all a reflection on this vague state of what is just on the threshold…

-Daniel Crokaert

(French version)

Jeph Jerman a une conception personnelle de l’écoute façonnée au fil des performances et des années, et entretient par la même occasion un rapport très intime avec ce qui l’entoure, nature, matières et objets…ici il partage son approche avec celle de Five Elements Music, autre apôtre de la déclinaison de l’organique…

Le résultat de cette gestation commune est un détour par un monde à l’abri du regard et régi par ses propres lois…
“Insecta” ne se veut pas transcription ou observation scientifique, mais plutôt narration poétique, narration nourrie des méandres de notre imaginaire où triomphe expressivité de la forme et force suggestive…et assez paradoxallement, le réel nous semble mieux cerné de cette façon…

“Insecta” nous donne à entendre, stridulations et bourdonnements, bruits de mandibules, le tout ralenti, muté, rechoréographié autour d’une trame motrice de sa propre progression…

Les phonographies retraitées pour leur part essentielle illustrent comportement et signal insectoïde au travers de l’habitat variable sur fond des murmures et craquements de l’écorce, du raclement sur les pierres, de l’odeur de l’humus tiède, du fin ruissellement, d’autre présence animale…
Chaque son étant une touche supplémentaire sur un canevas fuyant aux tons terreux…l’élaboration graduelle d’une topographie de l’insondable…

Il s’agit d’une exploration de haut vol axée sur le décalage, le ressenti, la perception du ténu…comme une incursion sur la pointe des pieds dans une zone sylvestre opaque…une vision par l’autre bout de la lorgnette, une lueur jetée sur l’acte de métamorphose, l’impermanence, et avant tout une réflexion sur cet état flou de ce qui est juste à la lisière…

-Daniel Crokaert

Jeph Jerman website
Five Elements Music website
Still * Sleep website

124

Arches. YANNICK DAUBY
(Touch 2011)

Wolves have occupied a special place in the mythologies of cultures around the world since time immemorial. Ancient stories of wolves are often divided into those which describe them as either agents of good or evil. Roman and Turkish foundation myths describe their descendants being raised by wolves, whilst Islamic, Scandinavian and western European cultures highlight their malevolent side. In the Bible there are 13 references to wolves which metaphorically illustrate human greed, lust, and dishonesty. From this it is no surprise that the howl of the wolf is culturally loaded. The listener reacts to the wolf’s call in ways prescribed by their dominant culture, with feelings of fear or respect.

It was with this knowledge that Yannick Dauby visited a wolf rehabilitation centre in France in 2010. This visit became the genesis of Arches, a 25-minute composition which celebrates the many variations of wolf vocalisations. The title for the work refers to the melodic line of the wolf’s howl which, on a still night,  can be heard over 15 kilometres. Dauby recorded a number of wolves at the French sanctuary in the darkness of night and early morning. These were later mixed to create this extremely emotive and unsettling work.

Arches is divided into four clearly defined movements, each exploring the varieties of sonic interactions between wolves. Beginning at a distance the audience is gradually guided closer to a wolf pack with each successive movement so that we are eventually posited uncomfortably close to their growling throats.

In the first movement Dauby establishes a gothic sense of the wolves wild and inhospitable territory through the sound of wind passing through trees. This is accompanied by a ghostly processed tone, reminiscent of an aeolian harp, which reinforces the primeval atmosphere. This tone features in other forms throughout the composition.

The sound of wolves howling in the distance introduces the second movement. Again a processed tone is juxtaposed with the field recordings, adding an element of weight and tension as it slowly and almost imperceptibly descends into hushed static. We are alone in the night with these distant and forbidding sounds, feeling equally awestruck and disturbed. The tension is continued in the third movement as we move closer to a seemingly vicious interaction between dominant and submissive wolves. Meanwhile an airy discordant drone floats uneasily in the background.

The fourth movement discards the processed tones in favour of layered field recordings. In this final section Dauby moves us another step closer to the wolves as we hear them howling, barking, growling and whimpering next to the microphones. The collective mass of these sounds is overwhelming, further increasing a sense of reverence and dread in the listener. By strategically positioning these recordings alongside those of ravens Dauby reminds us of the wolf’s place in our dark mythologies.

It is impossible to listen to Arches without considering our historical relationship with the wolf. Even for those who have never heard a wolf in the flesh it is hard to escape our culture’s way of interpreting it. In many parts of the world the wolf is endangered due to earlier government bounties and the expanding urban sprawl. Listening to Arches it is hard to imagine the absence of this animal in the soundscape of Eurasian and north American nights. It is with works such as this that field recording and sound compositions find their inherent worth, forcing us to listen to the familiar in new ways.

-Jay-Dea Lopez

Yannick Dauby website
Touch website

123

Radia. GLENN BACH
(Dust Unsettled 2012)

Standing on a rocky ridge looking out over a vast expanse of landscape in one of Wisconsin’s State Parks beneath an endless sky. The clouds are great citadels of enormous height moving slowly and casting their shadows over the grasslands below. The air is cool and the sun is high.

Long Beach, California sound artist Glenn Bach recorded Radia at various State Parks in California and Wisconsin. The field recordings were then combined with guitar feedback in an extremely subtle way. Released on Brian Lavelle’s Dust Unsettled label, the work is decribed as ‘an exploration of the blurred boundaries of geography, place and memory’, which pretty much nails it.

Radia is a subtle, organic paean to the vast North American wilderness. Rather than grandeur and monumentalism (tropes which have been done to death by numerous painters, photographers and composers), Bach focusses on the clear air and expanding horizons. The solitary figure in the landscape, attentive to the languages and nuances of his environment. Maybe at times there is no figure at all?

Tendrils of guitar generated sound hang in the air like vapour trails, dissolving and reforming in the lucid atmosphere. Sometimes like streamers being twisted in the wind, sometimes like a mist clinging to the ground.

Somehow the music generates these expansive spaces in the listener’s consciousness too. Of course this requires some effort on the listener’s part, but what work of any worth doesn’t? It is a two way process and deep listening yields rewards. Time dilates and the mind is cleansed by clear North American air. I would encourage using headphones and just surrendering.

The field recordings are presented as understated and intimate signs. Rain, grass, birds. At one point a plane flies over, the sound of it’s engine mirroring the drifting feedback that often arches across the tracks on this CD. Planes always draw attention to the spaces above. The extent of the atmosphere, and the fact that wherever you are, the human world is still liable to intrude.

This type of work is often described  as ‘lowercase’ music, along with the output of such artists as Steve Roden and Bernhard Günter. However, other than being quite quiet and having few dynamic peaks, it is hard to see the similarity. Although there is space in Radia, there is actually very little silence and there is plenty of detail and development. Also all playback devices have volume knobs these days. You can always turn it up a bit.

Certainly one of my favourite recent releases due to the way it unfurls and the images it conjours. To be able to make a little 5″ silver disc carry such a huge amount of land and sky is quite something.

-Chris Whitehead

Glenn Bach website
Dust Unsettled website

122

Plaza de Armas (Sonida de Sud America).
PAINTING OF WINDOWS
(Pseudo Arcana -under commission of Bunkland Records- 2011)

Antony Milton runs the PseudoArcana label from his base in New Zealand. He’s released numerous solo recordings and has also participated in a multitude of groups, duos, trios and any other combination of individuals you choose to mention. Somehow he still finds time to travel, in this case to various locations in South America.

The thing about Milton’s field recordings is that they always sound raw, fresh and full of life. This selection, released under the psudonym Paintings of Windows, certainly stays true to that ethos. The soundscapes of Milton’s South America are teeming with animals, birds, people and vehicles.

The majority of the 21 mostly short tracks were made in Peru and Bolivia with the occasional contribution from Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay and Chile. It’s a kind of rolling aural travelogue with each track fading into the next.

In the text accompanying Plaza de Armas Milton describes an eventful bus journey involving a couple of very different ‘snail oil’ salesmen, each in turn pitching their wares to a captive audience of drunken farmers on an autobus.

In Cusco Milton manages to capture a few seconds of a caterwauling beggar. Apparently the wailing man performed his blood curdling moaning on his knees outside the cathedral most nights, but once he had collected enough donations, he dusted off his clothes, patted down his pocket and disappeared into the crowd.

Milton isn’t afraid to let the needle swing into the red. His love of extraneous sounds is evident. The recordings are not cleaned up like clinical exhibits, they are left to breathe and carry their truth with them. During a recording of flamingos and 4WDs, once the music, presumably from the vehicles’ radios, starts to boom, that needle is in the red!

Maria Amelia Barca was an 80 year old widow returning down the Amazon to Iquitos after visiting her family in Lima. Milton had been wandering around the boat with his digital recorder and she wanted to know what it was, this instrument that could capture sound so faithfully. She asked if she could sing into it.

Maria introduces herself, and then sings unaccompanied for a minute or so. The result is truly moving and ends in delighted laughter. Apparently she wanted to listen over and over again to the recordings, and Milton was lucky to get off the boat with his digital recorder still in his posession. This is possibly the only time this woman’s voice has ever been captured.

Strangeness abounds everywhere and the air is full of secret stories. The air is also full of music. During the track Rurrenabaque/Ovalle Night Ambience, music issues forth from radios, pool balls click, motor bike engines rev and a piano plays. Everything exists together and edges are blurred. The track dissolves into a gentle rumble as if the tropical night has consumed everything.

These are just a selection of the many facets that make up Plaza de Armas, but there are many intersecting episodes. A fife and drum music school in a market place in Peru. A blind busker in Cusco. A bus terminal in La Paz. A fiesta parade band playing their celebratory music.

A world full of sound, but more importantly teeming with life.

-Chris Whitehead

Antony Milton discography
Pseudoarcana website

121

Life. LUIS ANTERO
(Audio Gourmet 2011)

Audio Gourmet is a rather lovely netlabel that offers a variety of mini albums, EPs and short sound works that “can be listened to in full during a standard working tea-break.”, which roughly equates to 15 minutes. Life is just one of many EP releases featured on the label and comprises 4 natural field recordings from Portuguese recordist Luίs Antero. I’m a big fan of Antero’s work and this is a perfect little taster of his style and subject interests. I also respect his intention to focus his sound recording efforts on locations in his native Portugal. True to form, these 4 recordings were made in two Portuguese locations: Arganil and Oliveira do Hospital. Each recording represents a specific element of the natural world, covering both environmental and wildlife sounds.

1. Wind

Blustery wind gusting through foliage is the subject of the first recording. An overhead aircraft gradually creeps into the sound picture, reminding us of the impact of humankind on the sonic environment.

2. Birds

The 2nd  track, Birds, presents the listener with an absolute cacophony of bird chatter. There must be at least a hundred birds contributing to this recording, either preparing to roost or getting ready to leave in the morning. Individual voices can be picked out if you listen hard enough.

3. Water

And now we come to water, one of my absolute favourite recording subjects. The gurgling of a flowing river / stream alongside a fairly busy road gently fades into another faster flowing body of water.

4. Frogs

The EP culminates in a gentle frog chorus comprising several individuals. The fore, middle and background are very well represented and you can easily picture a string of males each trying his very best to outdo his vocal competitors.

Life is a simple offering that definitely leaves the listener wanting more. No recording is more than 3 minutes in duration and before you know it, the EP has come to an end. A very nice package to enjoy when you need a quick break from the daily grind.

-Cheryl Tipp

Luis Antero website
Audio Gourmet website 

120

Environments 1: Psychologically ultimate seashore.
IRVING SOLOMON TEIBEL
(Atlantic 1974 / 1987)

‘The music of the future isn’t music’. This bold statement made almost forty years ago becomes quite interesting when we actually read it ‘in the future’, in 2012. The author of this sentence is probably Irving Solomon Teibel the man behind ‘Environments’, a series of field recordings based releases that were quite successful through the 70′s to the point that fragments from some of their many volumes are featured in the golden disc that travels on the Voyager spacecraft launched on 1977; this disc contains large amounts of data and documentation from the earth and the life that inhabits it, like some sort of “message in a bottle” that drifts through the cosmos.

Forty years into the future the interest towards culture and in particular music has changed. The fact that journals like A Closer Listen or The Field Reporter are busy reviewing newly released phonographic based works on a regular basis, means that there is a lot of people recording and using those recordings to make ‘albums and EP’s’. What Teibel was doing on 1974, musician Ludwig Koch did it too on the 1930′s and now -probably more then ever- loads of people are doing it too. An interesting fact about this is that a considerable number of the people that today captures sounds with musical and artistic purposes are desserted visual artists and rock, pop, jazz and classic musicians…for me this is a sign that the power and effectiveness of the visual image is in crisis. Also that the ability to put a big emotional and political input to to rock / pop is useless. Also this means a crisis of instituions like the academy and the conservatories in general. This is the poetical and political power of a man with a microphone, a recorder, an editor and access to media.

Back to Irving Teibel‘s interest on publishing field recording based material in vinyl discs, it started when he was working with multimedia artist and member of The Dream Syndicate Tony Conrad on his movie ‘Coming attractions. Teibel became strongly fascinated with his recordings from waves captured in Coney Island, NY. The interest of Teibel in publishing the captures from sea waves generated tension between him and Conrad to the point Teibel will later quit the movie crew after Conrad refused to join Teibel on Syntonics Research, the project behind the Environments series.

The utilitarian and commercial character that Teibel wanted to give to these recordings is obvious through the liner notes; I could guess this situation made impossible for Conrad and Teibel to continue working together: while Conrad was more of an avant garde artist and composer, Teibell seemed more of a sound producer interested on the therapeutical aspects of psychology.

Anyway Teibel indeed deserves a lot of credit: he published several albums of field recordings sounds on a major music label like Atlantic (Led Zeppelin) back on the mid 1970′s, when recording equipment was expensive and Chris Watson was on Cabaret Voltaire.

Teibel died on 2010 and on his obituary it reads:

‘Irv is most notably known for his recording series, Environments (TM) which was the first publicly-available psychoacoustic recording series. His company, Syntonic Research, Inc. was the first corporation to use the concept of acoustic noise masking via recorded sound, utilizing the myriad subtle sounds of nature.’

‘Environments 1’ is very strong work on its formal aspect. His psychological not to say ‘therapeutic’ approach barely addresses the more profound, artistic and poetical sense that can be found on the waves that Teibel recorded, a sense that can be found on the many things we can ‘hear’ while in resonance with the ‘white noise-like’ effect that a disappointed Teibel was pursuing when he entered the studio with the wave recordings. Teibel was highly frustrated towards the recorded material he captured for “Coming attractions’, but with the help of Louis Gerstman and an IBM 360 computer he managed to process those sounds making them ‘more real’ and satisfying to the point he finally published them.

One the most fascinating fact about ‘Environments 1’ is that in a safe bet some of the sounds featured here are pressed on a disc that is traveling through the space looking for ‘somebody’ who will listen to them in one of the most utopian and poetic efforts in the history of mankind. On this album we can hear what fascinated Teibel about those waves, we can hear his world and the noise it produces. In this sense noise appears like the new mirror in terms of the creation of images; images are created as a result of the resonance we establish with the sounds of our environment, with the world and with ourselves looking outside for our interior .

Dr. Snaut: ‘We need a mirror. We struggle to make contact, but we’ll never achieve it.’
-Solyaris. Andrei Tarkovski 1972

Teibel died two years ago but some of the sounds he recorded could be the last documented sounds to prevail in time. The work of Teibel and the story behind it presents really interesting and poetical questions towards the act of recording..towards the need of man to retain the present time like when we want to grab liquid water that slips through our hands (in another over-used figure); what happened with Teibel is about the impossible, the utopian…a memory made eternal when its imprint drifts through the infinite vastness of universe where sometimes we expect to metaphorically find ourselves; the poetry and importance of Teibel’s work and figure lies is the utopian effort behind capturing sounds and printing them on a lasting medium on our quest for eternity, of finding ourselves beyond the irreversible catastrophe of death.

* Environment 1 on its CD edition presents an extension of the Side A of the original vinyl album.

-John McEnore

Syntonic Research on Discogs
Sounds featured in the Voyager’s golden disc

119

Wild world. WILDLIFE RECORDING SOCIETY
(British Library 2011)

Wild World is a two-cd release which presents field recordings of untouched spaces from around the globe. The recordings date from 1988 to 2007 and were contributed by various members of the Wildlife Sound Recording Society.  The first c.d transports us to the woodlands and lakes of the European continent, while the second c.d features sounds captured in the forests of Australasia and South America. The focus of the field recordings is predominantly centred upon birdlife, however other animals including squirrels, indri, frogs and a hippopotamus also feature in the release.

Wild World‘s most immediate appeal is through its presentation of the contrasting biophonies that exist between the different continents. The exotic piercing calls of forest birds raise us to the canopy of tropical rainforests across South America and Asia, while the more subdued chatter of woodland birds reflect the temperate woods of western Europe. By presenting these regions separately on two cd’s it is possible to hear a distinction between them. The vocalisations of the European woodland birds are often short, high-pitched and fast.  Their calls overlap each other indicating a high level of group socialisation, whereas the calls of the tropical forest birds are often solitary, louder, and longer in duration.  This is perhaps a sonic adaptation to communicating through the dense foliage in which they live; a place where the auditory faculties are often more important than the visual. Aquatic birds also feature on Wild World, the most haunting of which belonging to the Common Loon. Its long call echoes throughout a Canadian river valley, creating a mournful atmosphere. That these affective qualities are caught by the recordist and then transferred to an audience highlights the potency of field recording.

The sounds of non-bird species provide a balance to Wild World. One track features a chorus of tree frogs from Puerto Rico in the foreground while in the background a dog barks, adding a strong spatial dimension to the recording.  A personal favourite is of the indri, one of the world’s largest lemurs, whose collective call dominates the Madagascan forests. For over seven minutes a family of indri communicate from the tree-tops, their melancholic calls resembling those of whales.

Moving beyond the enjoyment of Wild World‘s exotic sounds lies an urgent message concerning the ongoing survival of these spaces. As many of the recordings were taken in developing countries we are moved to question the future of these untouched habitats. Which of these sounds will survive a region’s transition into industrialisation? What has already been lost since the recordings were made? What will the future soundscape contain, what will be missing? These questions are an important part of Wild World‘s listening experience and once posed they cannot be ignored. As one of the Wildlife Sound Recording Society’s aims is to offer support for scientific study the recordings presented in Wild World will be a valuable resource when comparing the health of these habitats in the future. The emotional resonance stirred by Wild World‘s recordings might also provoke some listeners to engage with their environment in a more sympathetic way. One of the first steps in this process is potentially through the act of listening. It is here that the power and significance of Wild World, and field recording itself, reside.

-Jay-Dea Lopez

Wildlife Sound Recording Society website
British Library website

118

The fields remain while the recorder has long vanished. D’INCISE
(Impulsive Habitat 2012)

At the closest of its etymology, D’incise (aka Laurent Peter) cuts into the real as a matter, grasping it like a succession of moments of whom he applies himself to underline the edges, protuberances, and reliefs…

…as if only left were the shades, the outlines, snippets of voices, the wake of movements, spectral traces displayed in the style of Kirlian’s contact photography technique…so many blurred “silhouettes” haunting the field of action…emphasizing memories, giving them an anchoring…

The piece itself seems endowed with a own life, modeling its unreeling on a phenomenon of natural erosion.

Some details fray & fade, and an assemblage of selected sound scoriae lingers on of which the haunted layout pollinates an interlace of new trails…a kind of revisited essential skeleton…

An enormous mastery is needed by the artist to succeed in extracting himself from the landscape and engulfing us into these residual breathings, these brushings, and making us get a glimpse of something one can barely sense…

Colliding captured sounds, caught out from the everyday in constant dialogues of textures, D’incise clouds our easy reference points, depicting his own, ignoring innate demarcations & other contingencies…

…a recombinatorial work receptive to the world and the evanescent, where the human being tangles with the mineral, the vegetable, the artificial…a work which as the title suggests looks into our finitude opposed to the immutability of things…but rather than inducing an unrelenting melancholy, it strangely magnifies us…

-Daniel Crokaert

(French version)

Au plus près de son étymologie, D’incise (Laurent Peter) entame ici le réel comme une matière, l’appréhendant comme une succession de moments, d’instants passagers dont il s’applique à souligner les arêtes, saillies et reliefs…comme s’il n’y avait plus que les ombres, les contours, des bribes de voix, le sillage des gestes, des traces spectrales exposées à la manière de la technique de photographie de contact de Kirlian…autant de “silhouettes” floues hantant le champ de l’action…donnant du poids, de l’ancrage aux souvenirs…

La pièce elle-même semble douée d’une vie propre, calquant son déroulement sur un phénomène d’érosion naturelle…des détails s’effilochent, et s’effacent,

et surnage un assemblage de scories sonores choisies dont l’agencement habité féconde un entrelac de nouvelles pistes…une sorte d’ossature essentielle revisitée…

Il faut une énorme maîtrise de l’artiste pour arriver à s’extraire du paysage, à anticiper son inéluctable disparition et à parvenir à nous glisser dans ces souffles résiduels, ces frôlements, et à nous faire entrevoir ce que l’on peut à peine deviner…

Téléscopant ses sons captés, happés du quotidien dans de constants dialogues de textures, D’incise brouille nos repères faciles, campe les siens propres, ignorant démarcations innées et autres contingences…une oeuvre recombinatoire à l’écoute du monde et de l’évanescent, où l’humain se frotte au minéral, au végétal, à l’artificiel…une oeuvre qui comme le suggère son titre se penche aussi sur notre finitude opposée à la permanence des choses…mais plutôt que d’induire une implacable mélancolie, elle nous grandit étrangement…

-Daniel Crokaert

D’Incise website
Impulsive Habitat website 

117

Little jewel. COLLIN THOMAS
(self-release 2012)

Retour sur un lieu funeste, en 1959 Perry Smith rencontre Richard Hickock au café Little Jewel quelques heures avant de massacrer la famille Clutter, dans le Kansas. D’un article de journal lu par Truman Capote est né le roman “De sang-froid” (In Cold Blood).

Mais là où Truman Capote a éprouvé de la fascination pour les tueurs, et en particulier pour Perry Smith, Collin Thomas ne nous dit pas ce qu’il en est de son point de vue, est-ce fascination, catharsis, l’important n’est peut-être pas là, il nous reste son enregistrement réalisé cinquante-deux ans après sur la parcelle du Little Jewel.

‘Little Jewel’ ou ce qu’il en reste, l’enregistrement démarre par un drone, quelques minutes préparatoires à la découverte de l’espace, comme un seuil à franchir, un moment d’attente, de temps suspendu. Puis vient la prise, statique, extérieure, à tel point qu’on en vient à se demander si le bâtiment existe encore, tout ici n’est que souffle et esprit, pur Pneuma où se retrouvent parfois quelques interactions, une présence subtile de l’artiste à peine perceptible.

C’est comme si toute présence humaine cherchait à éviter le lieu, la circulation automobile est ténue, un avion se dévoile au loin, seules les arbres font corps avec le vent, perdent des feuilles qui viennent passer à proximité des microphones, quelques oiseaux sont là, choeur simple et naturel ignorant superbement la folie des hommes.

Des drones subtils viennent chercher l’harmonie, une enseigne semble grincer, une porte ou une fenêtre, et dans cet isolement on se surprend à guetter l’écho d’un passé révolu, deux hommes meurtriers en forment l’épicentre. Puis passé les secousses un premier retour cinquante ans auparavant, Truman Capote avec quoi, un crayon, des carnets, des heures passées à écrire, immobile au même lieu, on se dit alors que cet enregistrement s’écoute comme on lit un livre, indifférent au temps qui passe, jusqu’à ce que le vent s’apaise, que les drones viennent conclure cette pièce sonore qui aura su nous tenir en haleine, jusqu’à la dernière page.

-Flavien Gillié

(Translation to English)

Back to a deadly place, in 1959 when Perry Smith met Richard Hickock at Little Jewel’s coffee shop in Kansas a few hours before killing the Clutter family. From a newspaper article read by Truman Capote the novel “In Cold Blood” was born.

But where Truman Capote was fascinated with the killers, in particular Perry Smith, Collin Thomas doesn’t open himself up to what he has on his mind. Is this fascination? Catharsis? The important part is elsewhere: perhaps in this recording made fifty-two years after the plot of Little Jewel.

‘Little Jewel’, or what remains of it. The recording starts with a drone, a few minutes leading to the discovery of the location, of its space. As a threshold to cross, or a moment on hold, suspended in time. Then comes a field recording, static, outdoor. So much so that one comes to wonder if the building still exists, everything here is just breath and spirit, pure Pneuma. A few interactions are sometimes found, with the subtle, barely perceptible presence of the artist.

It is as if any human existence was trying to avoid the place, the street traffic is thin, a plane reveals itself in the distance, the trees integrate themselves in the wind, the falling leaves passing by the microphones, some birds are there as well, adding a beautifully simple and natural choir, ignoring human folly.

Subtle drones come to seek harmony, a store sign appears to grind, a door or a window. And in this isolation, we find ourselves lurking in the echo of a past long gone, with two murderers at the epicenter. Then, after the first jolts, we go back to fifty years ago, with Truman Capote, a pencil, a notebook, hours spent writing, motionless. And we tell ourselves that one can listen to this recording as one would read a book, indifferent to the passage of time. Until the winds die away, until the drones come to conclude this piece that will have kept us on our toes until the last page.

-Flavien Gillié, translation by Rodolphe Gonzalès.

-Collin Thomas website

116

La tierruca. JUAN PABLO MARTINEZ
(LEA 2012) 

‘La Tierruca’ is a wonderful montage of field recordings made in the Cantabria region of northern Spain by Juan Pablo Martinez. Martinez writes in the accompanying notes that the aim of the composition was to capture those sounds that resonated with him on a purely personal level. This tiny snippet of information gives so much to the listening experience. You are aware that these recordings were not collected purely for their sonic interest alone. There is a deeper meaning behind the selection that reflects the influence of sound on a man’s life.

Over the course of 45 minutes, ‘La Tierruca’ takes the listener on a journey through a range of different field recordings. The balance here is very effective; there is enough variation to keep the listener engaged, yet not too much so that you feel as if you’re running from one recording to the next. This is more of a marathon rather than a 100m sprint, but a very enjoyable marathon all the same!

Water is the dominating element and regularly surfaces throughout the course of the piece. Waves throwing their weight against sea cliffs, the patter of gentle rain and slapping water against cave walls are just a few examples of what to expect.

The pace of the composition gradually changes as we approach the end. The beginning seems more charged with energy; mechanical sounds, a plane overhead, and a motor boat contribute to this feeling. Even the water seems aggressive somehow. This energy is soon dispersed though, moving us into more tranquil environs. A peaceful, rural soundscape takes over.

A marching band towards the end of the piece is an unexpected but effective addition. Martinez refers to the power of music in uniting people and this segment conjures up images of joyful town gatherings. La Tierruca gently fades out on the sound of light rain which seems the perfect way to conclude this acoustic journey.

The high level of thought, technical ability and compositional skill behind ‘La Tierruca’ is obvious and the more I listen to the piece, the more impressed I become. This a beautifully crafted audio tour of locations and landscapes which have clearly inspired and nurtured the recordist in a multitude of different ways.

-Cheryl Tipp

Juan Pablo Martinez website
LEA website