Winter – Wade Matthews and Alfred Costa Monteiro

Wade Matthews – digital synthesis, manipulated field recordings

Alfredo Costa Monteiro – amplified springs, electric motors, radio

This album creates an engaging sound world full of invention. In its best moments the music  comes across as effortless, without any intention of showcasing a raft of original sounds simply for the sake of originality. That last observation should be taken in a positive sense – it matters very little whether sounds are original, unusual or ‘fashionable’. What matters in the kind of idiom we have here is that the sounds are interesting in themselves and in combination, that they are well shaped, layered and mixed, and that there are not so many sounds coming at you that you feel overwhelmed, that you have time and space to enjoy the music. In this respect Matthews and Monteiro have succeeded by means focusing on a restricted palette and by making best use of their fine listening skills.

In the first track Aconite, the sounds are generally difficult sounds to pin down. There is activity, predominantly in the noisy and fluttery sources, a powerful crescendo and a much gentler coda to settle us down. Regardless of whether this is composed, improvised, or both at once, behind everything lies a sense of restraint and craftsmanship.

Crookneck begins with a foreground of animated crackly sounds against a contrasting background texture, then offers us some detailed interest by means of activated springs. A few well-chosen sounds are brought together in a series of combinations. These combinations are given time to ‘work themselves through’ meaningfully, punctuated at times by sudden drop-outs. There are some beautiful passages here – a duet of springs plus the electronic sheen of some form of digital synthesis. We can identify the recognisable envelopes of some of the field recording material, despite being unable to identify the exact sources. The fact that I’m not spending all my time playing game show participant with the sound sources would suggest that the music holds much greater interest than a bunch of sounds composed in some fashion. The very obvious use of the radio breaks the acousmatic spell somewhat, taking us over that bridge between abstracted material to recognisable or referential material, introducing perhaps even an element of narrative. Here, and more generally throughout this album, the artists show good musical sense in letting passages run, allowing the sounds to unfold and speak for themselves. We finish again with another quiet coda. This piece is packed full of musical interest, again demonstrating a clever use of the restricted palette.

Flounder kicks off with radio, some static with accompanying indeterminate digital textures. Then metallic sounds. This piece seems very deliberately to set up a specific sound world, clear in its choice of materials, and to follow it through convincingly. Some obvious compositional or improvisational strategies – sudden dropouts, quick cuts – remind us that authors are still there. Again this is a fine piece which offers a listening environment full of interest, energy and invention. From a personal point of view, for what that’s worth, it goes some way along the direction I’d like to see music going. The artists have worked hard at selecting and shaping their sounds. Imposed form gives way to sonic interest, allowing form, at the best moments, to emerge from content.

Haven has a more introspective beginning: an almost instrumental pedal, a few background layers, blurred boundaries between foreground and background. This uncertainty is a strong feature of the album, particularly impressive when layers emerge and recede almost imperceptibly, over a tapestry of other textural and gestural activities. Modulations in the layers come to the fore, pushing through the intriguing textural veil, all done without any of the sounds jumping out at you demanding attention. Again, the use of the radio is foregrounded, this time as high frequency whispery radio voices which break the spell somewhat but are consistent with the use of the radio elsewhere. More importantly these sounds draw clearly perceptible structural relationships with what sounds to me like transformed contemporaneous material in a lower midrange layer.

Savory opens with two, then three well-chosen sounds. The layers and gestures enter, again promoting that effective uncertainty as to which will be foregrounded. The new sounds ‘materialise’ very well, again nothing surprising or unusual, but all very convincing – they simply fit well together. This piece took an unusual direction with the appearance of a processed vocal sound – a very odd referential musical syntagm. From this point, the music seemed to follow a markedly different direction from the previous pieces – out of kilter with the ‘edgy’ restraint of the previous tracks.

All in all, I’d offer the suggestion that the success of this album can be attributed to a two-piece arrangement in which the sense of focus and the merging of identities is almost complete, in which the music is delivered succinctly and with taste. We never feel that there are too many cooks in the kitchen and, at the risk of bending the metaphor out of shape, our two chefs have had the good sense not to throw the kitchen sink into the soup.

Winter is released on Copy for your Records

Knotted Alembic

Thanos Chrysakis: INSIDE PIANO, SYNTHESIZER, VIBRAPHONE & RADIO, SHRUTI BOX, CHIMES

Philip Somervell: INSIDE PIANO/PIANO

released on Aural Terrains

This new release reveals more of the rich inventiveness and creative drive behind Thanos Chrysakis, this time in a collaboration with Philip Somervell. Over the last few years I’ve been fortunate to have reviewed a range of work on Chrysakis’ label Aural Terrains, work which broadly falls into electroacoustic composition or free improvisation, Knotted Alembic being an example of the latter.

Knotted Alembic easily reaches, and in many ways surpasses, the very high standards of previous releases. From the first few seconds you are drawn immediately into the viscerality of the sound, the sense of agency, the simple but effective combination of two players attending to contrasting tasks – one more static, the other more dynamic. The natural reverberation of the inside piano is exploited to the full. My only criticism is that the first piece doesn’t go on long enough, such was the interest in the clear articulations of the restricted range of sounds added to the energy of the playing.

Tracks 3 and 5 continue this investigation of the inside piano. Here I should mention the overall quality of the recording, a fine studio engineering job. Track 3 is a remarkable piece of music: we have the suspenseful quality of restraint, where very simple chords are allowed to sustain, revealing the inharmonicity of the struck strings, and where silence is given a structural role. Each event attempts to explore a different articulation, a different timbral nuance. You are obliged to listen attentively. Track 5 examines further the inharmonicity of the piano, its metallic resonances. I drew parallels here with the timbral and spectral explorations of some of the new microtonal music played on hand made metallophones. I felt that in this track, apparently created earlier than the others and obviously in different circumstances, the piano playing was more agitated and a wider range of sounds used than elsewhere in the album, though the work unfolds at just the right pace to appreciate the entry of the radio passages. This piece came over as less integrated into the album, despite the elegance of several very beautiful and straightforward ‘musical’ passages.

Track 2 consists of a low midrange pedal and foregrounded actions on vibes, chimes, drone and piano. The iterations of the tuned percussion, the use of the piano as tuned percussion, snaps on the inside piano – all of these helped the music to move formlessly in and out of different moods.

Two of the pieces, tracks 4 and 6, focus on the use of the sruti box as a strong background presence. The sruti is always a good choice of instrument if you want a versatile but unobtrusive background cushion on which to sit with your various gestures. In fact that’s why I think the instrument was designed. I’ve always understood and experienced the sruti box in the context of an accompaniment instrument for chanting mantras, or for singing simple Sanskrit praise songs, like the tanpura. It’s not surprising therefore that it never offends. In track 4 exploits the beating inherent in the drone’s texture, which contrasts well with the piano figures. Track 6 sets a range of musical resources against the drone: inside piano scrapes (bowed perhaps?) which are so physical that you feel the materiality of the instruments with more than your ears, alongside a synth bass, adding texture and density. There is never too much at one time, a temptation wisely avoided throughout this album. In fact we return to the simple and time-honoured beauty of a figure and ground presentation, true in fact to to the sruti and other dronal instruments.

The last track is a short coda to the album, a sweet miniature with piano and synth,  another figure on ground.

The music never collapses into the easy option of alluding to the filmic, so simple to do with a piano whereby the player simply wanders around in a floating space of meaningless random chords and lines, often contextualised as ‘ambient’ to cover up any lack of design or intention. The artists’ close attention to the morphologies and materiality of the various sounds is far too important to let that particular kind of reductionism spoil the work.

Finally, going back over the output of Aural Terrains, I’d offer the suggestion that, because of its careful use of restricted resources, the hints of restraint and its fine treatment of pace and dynamics, Knotted Alembic is Chrysakis’ best offering to date.

This is an unusual album. It doesn’t fit into any of the emerging forms and idioms that seem to be establishing themselves across various labels and interest groups. You’ll find some fine simple string quartet writing and playing, plenty free improvisation, some synthesiser with various effects as in film sound design, indeterminate hiss, buzz and crackle, and various recitations of poems and texts.

The overall impression is one of increasing formlessness, which is what you might expect from the free improvisation, though the strings and recitations seem to pull the music towards more formalised structures. That tension is what makes the album unusual.

Brazilian Leo Alves Vieira and Spanish based Pangea are obviously accomplished musicians. We can see and hear this both from their respective biographies as artists and from the range of instruments and musical skills on offer. The clarinet and guitar passages are full of interest, only occasionally falling into those ‘what do we do next’ moments. After a few listens I began to pick up on hints of interplay between the instruments. After a few more listens the chaotic formlessness established itself just enough to be convincing as a musical statement, never an easy thing to do.

I’d say that the strength of the album, outside of some excellent playing, lies in the way that the artists have brought together a bundle of disparate, seemingly unrelated resources and have then effectively imposed their collective musical authority on the materials.

Released on Luscinia

Bruce Hamilton’s Spectropol Records is ‘a friendly netlabel devoted to excellent music unbound by venue and commerce; it’s a destination for adventurous music beyond journalistic and commercial style/genre classifications’.

If, like me, you have a soft spot for microtonal music, then you’ll enjoy browsing through the catalogue of free downloads. Bruce sent me the details of his label some time ago and I’ve been listening off and on to the range of work offered on two albums, Duopoly and Possible Worlds.

And it is indeed a wide range: work based on the use and modification of conventional instruments, vocal pieces, new instruments, electronic instruments, and, yes, even, retuned synthesisers. I still have difficulty with the last of these, but even with that personal caveat, I’d say that the synth based works are well crafted in spite of the instrumentation. The main problem for me in listening to new work in this idiom is simple. Some of it is truly musical – the music rises above the technical means of production, that is, it succeeds in spite of the cleverness or complexity of scale structures or the hardware/software used to realise the work. Some, on the other hand, comes over as a demonstration of a particular scale or set of scale structures. The worst just sounds like out of tune music played with cheesy timbres. I’ll leave it to the listener to find out more.

Possible Worlds is described as a ‘snapshot’ of work, a series of  ‘recent xenharmonic explorations’. We are informed that xenharmonic is ‘a term coined by Ivor Darreg used to describe tuning systems, or music using those systems, which does not conform to or closely approximate the common 12-tone equal temperament’. Ivor Darreg  is worth checking out – a real original and an inspiration to countless musicians who have gone on to make significant impacts in the field of new microtonal music.

The online sleeve notes are comprehensive and informative. I recognised many of the names, indeed I’ve met several of the musicians over the years: Paul Rudy from the world of acousmatic music (who once let me stroke his cactus…); John Eaton, whose Agnus Dei is a very fine choral work, even though I can’t tell from listening how ‘microtonal’ the piece is (is the singer following a scale or simply inflecting more or less in microtones?); Stephen Altoft, who has championed microtonal trumpet for many years; Christopher Bailey, a truly original voice in new music; Manfred Stahnke, and of course Bruce Hamilton himself.

I’d recommend this compilation because it’s quite unique and over time certain works will grow on you. I can’t even begin to guess what you’ll like or dislike, but I can say that the music is different from a lot of new music out there and I know from experience that the musicians themselves are deeply committed to their work, so there certainly depth in there.

For the same reasons I’d recommend having a taste of Duopoly, another mixed bag, but this time a series of collaborations involving Bruce Hamilton and others, describe by Hamilton as ‘the result of collaborations between late 2009 and late 2010 via the ImprovFriday and the Society for Shorty New Music online musical communities. Most of these tracks are in some sense remixes I made of pre-existing tracks, ranging from enhanced versions to entirely new compositions using the tracks as source material. Often improvisation was involved for one or both artists; some pieces employ alternate tuning systems’.

So here we have a window into a community of musicians sharing common interests across specific notions of improvisation, tuning and sharing. Again the range is very wide: from unpredictable and formless synth based pieces, to free, skimpy and meandering jazzy two piece works, to filmic ambient keyboard based pieces, to more introspective pieces such as the very fine propinquitwo for (as far as I can tell) microtonal zither.

I notice that there have been four new releases since the two albums I’ve mentioned above, each by well established musicians in their respective fields. If you don’t know of their work, then hopefully these will be new artists whose work you can explore and enjoy on this fine netlabel over the festive break.

Barrel, so called because they scrape, are as follows:-

Alison Blunt – violin

Ivor Kallin – vioilin and viola

Hannah Marshall – cello

The tracklist gives us some clues about what to expect in the music:-

1 - RIGWIDDIE SNAUCHLE STRIKES AGAIN IN STYLE - 22:21
2 - SOFT PORN & HARD CHEESE - 1:49
3 - SKLATCH: unseemly semi-liquid mess - 22:29
4 - MOTHS & FEATHERS - 32:17

I’ll begin with a preamble.

Free improvisation has become very trendy of late. This is not surprising in view of some of the disappointments of post dance derivatives and unfathomable noise art. In particular the more reductive trends seem to be finding the most favour with reviewers and other doxosophers, folks who tell us the way things are.

It helps to move things along if the artists associate with other artists of the same ilk, hunting in packs if you like, or if they associate with untouchable ‘masters’ in the field, or if one conjurs up a name for the ‘school’ (useful for the media to scoop up) such as the new pan-European texturalists or similar.

In fact it’s reached the stage that some artists could record themselves shitting into a bucket and the specialist reviewers would say, ‘well, I don’t understand it, (s)he might be taking the piss (excuse the scatological references) and I don’t know if I really like it at all, but (after some devious literary manipulations) it just has to be good because it’s by x, y or z. We’re talking here of course about taste, more or less informed.

What I can say about Barrel is that their music doesn’t fit into any of the current categories, schools, sects or cliques that clutter the free improvisation stage. Although it’s not my regular ‘cup of tea’, the music has made a strong and positive impression on me, I like it a lot and I’ll listen to it time and time again. It’s what I would call very good music, that judgement contingent of course on my more or less informed taste.

We have four pieces, two digital home recordings and two recordings of live performances. How can I begin to talk about the music? Well, imagine three first class musicians locked up in a time capsule, having associated with various shamans, drunk Romanian fiddlers, Yiddish chant leaders, the serialists, especially Webern. Then folks like Ligeti, Satie, and various Dadaists pop their head round the door from time to time to put in their tuppenceworth. After a few months you let them loose in the 21^st century to pick up on the very new. That would be Barrel.

I remember talking to a musician who had just been to a concert of Schoenberg’s string quartets. Her conclusion was that it all sounded so normal nowadays. Perhaps it’s hard to make strings sound too atonal, given that the bowed string has such a low inharmonicity. I don’t know for sure but possibly because of the strings we have here this very listenable trio, playing of course in a very modern, even modernist, idiom. Then you begin to notice the folk influences, the strange groaning, coughing, snippets of (mock?) Yiddish chant and other incomprehensible utterances from Ivor Kallin. I could go on to talk about the musical and artistic implications of Ivor Kallin’s half-Jewish and half-Scottish roots, but the potential for political incorrectness prevents me.

Add to the aforementioned elements the extended techniques, emerging ‘legitimately’ (ie beautifully and seamlessly integrated into the flow of the music) and finally the inexplicable ‘tightness’, inventiveness, complexity and meaningfulness of the musical conversation between the three. Throw in their understanding of each other and finally what I would call ‘human-ness’ in the ebb and flow or rhythms of the pace of the music. Like bio-rhythms. On top of all that, and at the risk of sounding contradictory, I still can’t believe that most of this isn’t scored music, not least because of the elegant balance between the higher strings and the strong foundation of the cello.

Focusing on the verbal intrusions, I’d point you directly to 213TV, Ivor’s collaborative video project with John Bisset. Need I say more? What struck me in their work is how, in both form and content and by means of glossolalia, mock violence, postures and gestures, the pair manage to hover around the cusp that separates seriousness from humour, most evident in Smoo. Sometimes I’m not sure how to react, a feeling I experienced in French theatre after seeing a lot of plays by Ionesco, Beckett and Genet. At times In listening to Barrel’s music I find this to be a strength, a tap into the very strongest forms of 19^th century European art.

All in all, because Barrel have such a firm, sure and confident grasp of life and music their work succeeds at all levels in enriching my own musical life. I happen to believe that their music will do the same for many others.

Yannick Franck’s work is well documented on his personal site. He runs the Idiosyncratics label and is very active both as a solo performer and with his YERMO project. From what I can gather he seems to be branching out into new areas, more research based recording projects. Hopefully I’ll be able to review some of the outcomes in the near future.

If you like his past work, you’ll enjoy this. But from what I’ve listened to in the past, I’d say that this new album has a more refined or sophisticated quality and comes over as an exercise in restraint. In terms of technical resources, things are quite straightforward -the artist tells me that he mostly uses analogue gear, ‘processing samples of my own voice and real instruments, and of course some software based instruments as well, but used only as a part of the composition process’.

Diving headlong into definitions, the music is ambient in some of the senses that Eno mentions in his Music for Airports liner note though there is a quality in the production that draws the listener in more than perhaps Eno envisaged. There are also ‘dark tendencies’, a cinematic concern with atmosphere and mood brought about by the use of dense textural layers. There are six pieces – one or two of the titles giving away Franck’s concern with the darker side, for example Urban Disease and Self Loading Defeat.

So what are the most evident characteristics of the album as a whole? Restraint first and foremost, most evident in Vides Linja where the feeling is that of holding back from the big overpowering gesture or texture which would break the spell.

Overall we find the same tonal (pitched) layered textures as in earlier works, a preference for the low to midrange, with the occasional gesture or contrasting layer, a light crackling and high frequency tones in Invott/Elements, a digitally modified birdscape in Helsingin Subterranean. We have looped pulses of timestretched instrumental sound offset with the occasional percussive flourish, as in Urban Disease. This piece had me travelling back to early Pink Floyd, waiting for a delicious Dave Gilmour solo to burst in. Very well balanced, high production standards, all evidence of a profesiional sound designer at work. Nothing too intrusive. I’ve heard music like this composed by less adept listeners which gradually starts to irritate as certain midrange frequencies are left running.

Good use is made of the back to front perspective: normally you’d play at spotting the clever use digital reverberation software, but in Invott/Elements and Helsingin Subterranean in particular the illusion of large mysterious spaces is beautifully fabricated – I’m hearing the space and not the software, if that makes sense.

A sense of narrative emerges at times, especially strong in The Answer which introduces background voices over (mostly pitched) modulating textural layers. The collage of these different nationalities speaking in English is offset by ‘stuff’ crashing about in the background. Towards the end I could pick out what sounded like quotations from various films.

The only track that did break the spell was Self Loading Defeat with its hint of synth and drum beats. But, and this probably says more about me than the music, I had inner visions of ‘bad things’ being done to victims, perhaps inappropriately clad virgins locked up in some crypt or another. All this without the use of corny ‘scary’ clichés.

The cleverest thing that Yannick has managed to do here is to make gentle statements within an idiom that doesn’t really thrive on gentleness. In a very unique manner, the music manages to be dark without being harsh or unpleasant.

Personally (yes, I know that my personal likes or dislikes are irrelevant) I liked this album the more I listened it. Yannick Franck strikes me as someone who knows what he wants and why he wants it. He also knows how to do it.

Yannick Franck‘s Memorabilia is released on silken tofu records

Mark Peter Wright’s Where Once We Walked is described as a sound composition based on location recordings gathered from the Polish homes, villages and surrounding environments of Holocaust survivors of 1945, who, as children, were transported to the Lake District and cared for at the now ‘lost’ wartime village of Calgarth Estate near Windermere.

This is one of the very few sound works I’ve encountered which sets out to engage with a subject of real historical and social importance, above and beyond the historical and social importance of, say, working more narcissistically with abstract sound as an art form. We have here an extremely emotive subject, a subject overworked in the extreme by a Hollywood film industry obsessed with what can only be described as war and holocaust pornography, and of course a subject which requires sensitivity in the approach and artistic treatment.

Before listening to the work I was struck by the simple elegance of an act of compassion, people caring for other people, children in this case, and by the local link to Lake District, a link established to a large extent by the artist/curator organisation Another Space.

We are invited to listen to the work, with its five episodes, as one whole piece. Overall the work is marked by detail, clarity and transparency in the actual quality of the recordings, by a leaning towards realistic or even naturalistic representation though the framing, sequencing and gentle crossfading of the various scenes. The various elements work well to deliver an exceptionally powerful narrative whose mood lifts the listener above and beyond the mere fact of well captured location recordings.

I think we should give work like this more attention and certailnly more credit for investigating new narrative forms. Because of the weight of narrative, this kind of work always strikes me as drawing closer to literature than to music or to what passes for ‘sound art’. I say this  because the best critical theory I’ve found which helps me to understand such work comes from two discourses sharing an interest in semiotics: the semiotic branch of literary theory and analysis, and some of the excellent writing on photography. In the sonic department the only critical writing that makes sense in this context would come from some of the very clever commentators and critics working in the field of new radio art.

Bakhtin, in the contest of examining specific literary forms, writes of the chronotope, a space/time unique to every work. Where Once We Walked presents us with an unfolding tableau of several chronotopes, though the strength of the work lies in the fact that we are able to join everything up, drawn as we are into the illusion of completeness by means of narrative method. Worthy of further consideration in this context, again from Bhaktin, is the notion that we can seek out chronotopic motifs, condensed reminders of particular types of time and space which carry metaphorical resonances: church bells, train stations, water and birds, subjects which would seem to be inexhaustible in their multiple resonances and dear to numerous field recordists.

The opening episode, A Past Present, leads with the pealing of church bells, then carries us slowly and gracefully inside the church to simple choral music, to the church organ and then to what sounds like a station, where the sound fades to a lingering resonance, holding on to the quality of the earlier music. Linear and filmic on the surface, but with deep undercurrents.

In Tobacco Trails we find ourselves outdoors with water and birds, very clear and clean. Long slow crossfades reveal a train departing, a train arriving, people talking and a muted tolling bell. Everything gives the impression of being very expertly scripted, again in a cinematic sense. Passages of composed polyphony underline the fact that this is a sound composition.

Hope Transmits begins with (I assume) a Jewish religious chant. This is layered with rain – this scene in particular seems to me to be representative of something deeply emotional – then thunder, heavier rain, electronic radio sounds and an abrupt cut off, possibly a combination of narrative exigency and a sharp contrast to the earlier very effective diminuendi. On the topic of an emerging narrative, I’d say that the composer has succeeded in walking the very fine line between telling us just enough and letting us create something meaningful for ourselves.

With Witness we listen to cars and to the ambience of a town or cityscape. More church bells, this time in the distance, carrying the weight of penitence. These recurring motifs speak to me of the artist’s restrictions on his choice of materials (I can imagine the dilemma of deciding whether to introduce new material, from hours of ‘footage’, or choosing to establish repetitions). We  then hear bicycles, other vehicles in transit, cars idling. I should mention here that I particularly enjoyed, perhaps for the first time, the sound of cars idling, a sound which always seems to intrude and spoil most recordings carried out in urban settings. Perhaps it’s down to the skill in framing. The bells reassert themselves, then linger till the end of the episode. I for one could listen to bell recordings all day.

The last episode, Where Once We Walked, delivers an interesting twist on the bell theme, this time in the shape of a clock bell plus the whirr of its internal machinery. It is 9 o’clock. A voice in distance, coloured by loudspeakers, is then layered with the interior of a place of worship, an interior marked by the sound of people moving in a large reverberant space. I might be wrong, but I always associate this kind of sonic complexity, the movement and spatial cues, with Roman Catholic places of worship, where all  sorts of social and liturgical events seem to be going on simultaneously, as opposed to the more ordered and focused soundscape of Protestant churches. This takes us to the broadband noise of water, possibly rain, then to birds (because the narrative environment invites meaningful interpretation we might well ask what these birds represent: symbols of peace, hope?), the hint of an organ, bees. We end up more or less where we began, in the same kind of comforting space, a place of worship, this time with the pentatonic folk melodies of a simple hymn and its organ accompaniment. Church music is unique in delivering this particular experience, a beauty in which we can participate. The footsteps to finish invite the listener to come to his or her own conclusions.

This is an excellent work and it comes over well as a cd release. But I see this kind of work as finding its best presentation as a radio work, taking advantage of all that the radio can offer. It belongs with the the kind of work we need so much in order to overcome hackneyed documentary conventions in public broadcasting, the sort of work that, even if it doesn’t get much radio play,  is persistently highlighted by the Canadians and the French in particular as radical, (and at the same time) forward thinking, and most of all optimistic.

artwork and notes (pdf)

Falco peregrinus: undisputed virtuoso of sonic diffusion, angel of death.

John Alec Baker’s book The Peregrine is, at one level, a detailed document of the author’s investigations into the behaviour of two pairs of peregrines between autumn and spring along a stretch of coastal Essex. Long considered to be a classic or even a masterpiece of the nature writing genre, the book is certainly worth its reputation, certainly as a work of stylistic excellence. In his introduction to the edition I refer to (NYRB Classics, 15 Feb 2005 ) Robert MacFarlane sums up the author’s style very well:

a style so intense and incantatory that the act of bird-watching becomes one of sacred ritual. (p viii)

In writing this essay as someone who works with sound, my interest in Baker is twofold. I’m interested to a certain extent in the way that Baker’s awareness of sound helps to drive his narrative. More importantly, I cannot avoid referring to Baker’s work by way of introduction to my own story of a sonically charged experience with falco peregrinus, my lifelong favourite creature.

Baker’s world is predominantly one of intense, almost obsessive attention to visual detail, which is understandable given the observational basis of his field work. Furthermore he succeeds very well in representing his engagement with a sombre landscape whose muted tones overshadow every outing. His awareness of sound is not exceptional, in comparison say, with that of Thoreau, Susan Fenimore Cooper or Aldo Leopold. This is not a weakness – Baker has other specific concerns in his work. In drawing the reader’s awareness to matters of sonic interest he simply wishes to add interest to the documentary agenda.

Nonetheless I should mention his very effective similes, for example this one on short-eared owls:-

One bird called; a sharp barking sound, muffled, like a heron calling in its sleep. (p64)

Here one bird sounds the same as another bird, like a circular dictionary definition for the non-twitcher.

I also found the occasional touch of exquisite attention to detail:-

I heard a dead leaf loosen and drift down to touch the shining surface of the lane with a light, hard sound. (p65)

Light and hard at the same time? How does he remember these details? Does he note them down at the time or do they just come to him afterwards? Perhaps they are even fabrications, made up as he writes in order to enhance the narrative. In his favour I would say that I’ve heard a similar sound myself waiting in a forest whilst recording high winds. Both light and hard at the same time.

As you’d expect we have flurries of onomatopoeia:-

…a sharp hissing and thrumming of wings… (p65)

Sparrows shrilling in tall elm hedges near the river. (p74)

along with rhetorical devices such as this where he evokes the presence of absence, the ominous presence of silence:-

The flat land was a booming void where nothing lived. (p67)

Overall I found the book to be a dour read with its spirit of relentless obstinacy around the whole enterprise which to me, as an environmental field recordist, was too close to home. Yet the darkness of the seasons, the cold and wet weather, the days spent slogging it out in order to cover the falcon’s extensive domain have contributed to the enduring appeal of Baker’s work. A morbid love of disgusting British weather is a perennial feature of homegrown nature writing.

My meeting with falco peregrinus was a less punishing affair. The Highland setting was to my mind more typical of an encounter with, I am told, the fastest creature on the planet.

Lochnagar in the Cairngorms of North East Scotland is an excellent walking and climbing mountain, especially in winter when snow and ice conditions become alpine and occasionally arctic, though less so recently with the milder winters. The summit Cac Carn Beag is only 3789 feet above sea level. The pressure of too many visitors nowadays means that every winter more and more climbers fall off the cliff, a unique way to spend a holiday. Added to that inconvenience is the slow but sure erosion of the paths and gullies. For my part, as a teenager with the mountains close by I was fortunate to have this wilderness as a personal playground for long months every year.

The mountain’s corrie (cirque, cwm – there’s not really an English word for it) is like a deep funnel of rock with a heather and boulder-strewn base. Three sides of rock buttress, gully and wall enclose the climber. The fourth is the very narrow hidden entrance to the corrie, where two folds of ridges rise and overlap, deepening the impression of being closed in. Dramatic, serious, it is a place where even insensitive humans will become alerted to signs in the environment, especially of a sonic nature.

On some summer days when the wind drops, the skies clear to light blue and you can climb on the warm granite with a single layer of clothing. On one such day I found myself ‘gardening’ a rock climbing route along with fellow obsessive compulsive Doogie Dinwoodie, a legendary climber of his generation. Gardening means that you climb a route in summer, taking as much time as you need to check out every feature: handhold, ledge, crack and slab. As you go you clean up the route using all sorts of brushes and scrapers, removing as much vegetation from the line as possible. Then, having mapped a template of the route into your mind/body complex by means of feeling, caressing and penetrating your way over and into every inch of it, you return in winter and grab a first ascent, thereby promoting your alpha male attributes throughout the group.

The route, appropriately named Nymph, was (and still is unless it’s become hopelessly eroded) a highly enjoyable and fairly straightforward steep ascent with good exposure and a perfect panoramic view of the corrie. For much of the time gardening involves long periods of inactivity as you wait for your mate to clean up his pitch – climbing is a secondary concern. Thus, high on the upper reaches of the face, a good few hundred feet above the corrie floor, I balanced on a ledge belaying my climbing partner above, lazily teasing out rope every few minutes, enjoying the smell and touch of warm rock, listening to the breeze, looking for new unclimbed lines, scanning the corrie walls for signs of recent rockfalls.

Looking up I saw that Dinwoodie had stopped gardening to pay attention to a commotion in the corrie. I had noticed it some time after it started, having taken it for granted for about quarter of an hour. Baker describes a similar experience as follows:-

A monotonous ‘keerk, keerk, keerk’, sound began, somewhere to the west. It went on for a long time before I recognised it. At first I thought it was the squeak and puff of a mechanical water-pump, but when the sound came nearer I realised that it was a peregrine screeching.(p55)

It was the sound that pulled me in. A peregrine (I’ll opt for the female, larger and more powerful than the tiercel or male), flying two hundred feet or so below me, was letting out its hunting call, more like a war cry than a birdcall, hurling itself round the corrie at unbelievable speed in ever decreasing spirals. At first I thought she was upset because we were closing in on the nest, but it became clear that this hawk wasn’t interested in us in the slightest. It also crossed my mind that perhaps she was under threat from a predator, but what on earth would have the skill and speed to threaten a peregrine up here? Besides, falco peregrinus is a bold one – I saw a fine adult perched on a fence post once as I drove past in the car. I stopped the car, got out and walked to within five feet. She looked at me lazily, turned away and carried on scanning the moor. And of course the peregrine doesn’t have too many predators, outside of psycho redneck farmers who shoot or poison anything that isn’t a sheep or a cow. The only other real threats are patterns of unnatural predation in territory caused by human intrusions into the mountains (crows and seagulls raiding bins and extending their range), erosion, humans eliminating the peregrine’s prey.

Eventually something intuitive kicked in and I pieced it all together as if I had known all along: hawk, raptor, hungry, prey, angel of death.

To this day the peregrine’s performance has been one of the most transfixing sonic experiences I’ve ever had. At the time it’s simply exhilarating – that privileged feeling of being in nature at a unique point in time witnessing the event from the upper balcony, the best seats in the theatre. No amount of film or recording gear could have captured the drama. Although I classify this as a fugitive sound, one I missed out on as a recordist, the only way I could have come anywhere near to capturing the scale and drama of this performance would have been to place a hundred or so microphones around and across the corrie. Then I’d have to install a hundred speaker installation in a massive listening space. Ridiculous and impossible.

It’s taken me until now to unpack what was going on in terms of the sonic processes. Here’s what I think, with the caveat that, not being a professional twitcher, zoologist, ethnologist or ecologist I can’t prove anything scientifically. I would say in my favour though that sometimes common sense explanations simply work.

The corrie is a funnel – the peregrine takes an ascending trajectory to the top of the funnel to map out the lie of the land. Then she begins her spiral descent, wide at first – the top of the funnel is a kilometre in diameter – narrowing as she descends. She begins her battle cry. This will have an immediate effect on every living creature within earshot. Humans like me will interpret the sign at different rates by responding either with admiration and excitement or perhaps hearing the call of a feathered pest and nuisance. The effect on the the fauna of the environment is at once immediate and critical – every bird and small mammal will either bolt for cover or (this would be my reaction if I were such a creature) stand rigid and shite itself – quietly. A pun and variation of flight or fight.

Now, as my American cousins would have it, you do the math. This is at the same time the aesthetic part and a revelation of the marvels of evolutionary genius. Even Richard Dawkins might be moved to feel the presence of something greater than himself at work. Flying with a maximum air speed of around 60mph and a gravity assisted descent worth several more tens of mph, she begins her loud and terrifying call at point A, repeating the call about twice every second. The sound travels (at the speed of sound no less) across and around the corrie, working its way into the thousands of nooks and crannies of the rock faces, bouncing and echoing across every feature across multiple dimensions. By the time she reaches point B at the other side of the corrie, the sonic ‘image’ or complex will be the aural equivalent of Heathrow’s air traffic control centre on a bad day. Echoes from the earlier calls will be dying out as new calls are uttered. To further confuse the prey, because there is a purpose to all of this, our peregrine is looking downwards, shoulders hunched, head moving rapidly to the left and right, throwing quantum packets of sonic energy into the various features of the rock walls and the corrie floor. Weapons designers have copied this behaviour in refining the eye detection technology of attack helicopter pilots who simply look at a target to guide the weaponry. Nature hasn’t so far allowed any other creature to develop such ruthless killing tactics – our peregrine still has to work some more to achieve her objectives.

Any prey that hasn’t bolted to safety will have the impression of being under attack from a squadron of peregrines, unable to work out the location or dimensions of the danger. How many are there, where is she/they, from which direction is she coming, where’s she heading? Flight is no longer an option, so you stay rooted, petrified with fear. It all makes sense – the visitation of the angel of death, a thing of such power and beauty, would stun you – you’d likely let it all happen. Then she strikes at high speed, from behind, her large thumb talon eviscerating, filletting, decapitating the chosen specimen. This is followed by another rise to the top of the corrie and a second mission. She has young to feed. She’ll make a few kills, feed herself, then take something back to the nest. A good day on the mountain for us and the hawk.

Some questions of a scientific nature come to mind – would Baker’s peregrines have been able to carry out this sort of sonic sorcery if they were transplanted from the coastal to the mountain environment? In other words,is this skill hard wired into the bird as a species, used when appropriate, but always passed on in the genes as a matter of course. Or does the mountain bird learn these ‘site specific’ skills on the job, discovering or learning them by simply having a go? My naïve analysis would be that natural selection should dictate variations in hunting abilities and habits depending on environments, but something tells me that any peregrine will be able to carry out this sonic attack quite easily, because they’re much cleverer than we think.

So when I hear of sonic mastery and wizardry by humans, let me counter this by pointing out that sound isn’t even the peregrine’s core practice. She’s more of a performance artist or illusionist, spending much of her time tricking and fooling birds into lifting themselves from valley floors in large flocks simply by flying in amongst them, relying on the odds and percentages of chance.

Finally, a reflection on sound as a catalyst in pulling together elements which define the character of an environment. By this I mean to ask what is it that makes certain environments so typical of themselves, if that makes sense? For me it’s the sound. Of course this is impressionistic, emotional, not-very-rational, subjective, non-scientific and therefore interesting.

I once heard, then much later saw, a massive stag silhouetted against the early morning sunrise high up on a mountain ridge above Glen Doll, not too far as it happens from Lochnagar as the crow flies. I was eleven years old. The sound, above and beyond the sight, immediately and involuntarily brought the character of the whole environment together in my mind/body complex – glen, stag, heather, hills, all embedded in a unique environment with its own characteristics. The same happened with the peregrine, the same with the grunting and braying of reindeer outside a mountain cave shelter one winter, again in the Cairngorms.

Where biophonies act as environmental signatures we are perhaps coming closer to the roots of totemic approaches to understanding or interpreting the mysteries of aspects of the natural world, closer to the highly developed sensibilities of ‘other’ cultures.

Idea Fire Company, The Island of Taste

Swill Radio 026

Just when you think you’re on top of things, you realise you’ve missed something important that’s been around for a long time. I’ve only ever heard mention of the Idea Fire Company somewhere at the periphery of my little world. But from the quantity, and indeed quality, of the releases: vinyl, cd and moving image on dvd, I wish I’d investigated further. These are artists of substance.

Just a few days ago Scott Foust very kindly sent me a selection of the work of Idea Fire Company for review. This is the first, chosen at random from the works on vinyl, cd and dvd that he sent.

First I have to mention the beautiful cover art with the elegant envelope inside containing printed cards, again beautifully designed and illustrated. Why does this all make me so happy about vinyl? Perhaps size does matter.

The cards offer us a thought-provoking polemical essay, an analysis of taste and the use of social and personal time, an exhortation to seek and to practise creativity outside of what’s given us by the system. Debord and Baudrillard would seem to be behind the critique of spectacle frequently mentioned and there are shades of other neo-Marxist ideas, all of which make perfect sense, unless of course you have a vested interest in the other side of the equation. All of which presumably has to do with the music. As I’m always loath to try to unearth politics from music, unless it’s protest songs, I’ll presume that it’s the conditions surrounding the making of music that is under examination, perhaps even the intentions. There’s plenty more here.

First time through, although I enjoyed the music, I wasn’t sure why this should be. Everything seemed to be reasonably straightforward. But once I took the broomstick from out of my a*se, dropped my prejudices and stopped listening like a bigoted Puritan, many things became clear. First and foremost, by way of a kind of sideways abstract comparison with, say, the efforts of students or inexperienced musicians, this came over as well wrought music, everything in its right place, thoroughly original in concept and execution (I’m struggling to find comparisons) and seemingly effortless.

A quick run through some of the tracks:-

Land Ho! for piano, tapes, hydrotronics (?), loops and fork offers us a taste of field recordings, repetitive, then obviously looped, accompanied by a bell sound. Many of the initial sounds and (compositional or improvisational?) approaches in this first track set the tone for subsequent offerings.

The Island of Taste presents field recordings with birds, a two chord repetitive piano harmonic figure in contrary motion, occasionally varied and arpeggiated, far more ‘intense’ than some of the indie pop stuff (‘achingly bittersweet’, etc) that you get posing as ‘new’ music. Passages of rushing enveloped sound, possibly white noise generated from a synth played by Frans de Waard of a previous review (small world), push towards a blend of the hypnotic and the filmic, but always clever enough to maintain integrity. It’s very hard not to find this enjoyable, even for Miserablists like myself.

Over on side B, Bitter Victories is dominated by a fundamental tone created by a swept squarewave with a touch of vibrato, harmonics peeling off and sustaining. I used to love creating these sounds when I had a Doepfer system which I sold to buy a mac – how stupid was I? It’s like an instrumental rendition of a Tuvan throat singer.

Lost Victories for piano/radio is such a strong piece with its excellent use of radio. You’d hardly know it was a radio at all. The accompanying piano pedal hints at a chamber music approach to the instrumentation. I was delighted at the surprise of the two instruments working so well together. I’d like to know more about their pre-compositional strategies – do they just get together in the studio and go for it with a few loose ideas or is there more form and shape to the preparations? Maybe I’ll find out for the next review.

Heroes of the Last Barricade (obvious allusions to Revolution and uprising in the title) for three female voices, loops, tapes and materials comes over as a beautiful work for field recordings and three part chorus. It doesn’t strike me as ‘organised’ (if that’s the right word) enough to be chorally composed, but it is organised enough to convey a sense of conviction. The voices slip in and out of consonance/dissonance with their simple harmony. Like seals or perhaps even sirens singing gently for a few seconds, then a hint of electronic timbre, then very recognisable female voices – great listening.

What we have here are textures, contrasts, colours, orchestration, combinations, mainly visual analogies, but you get the drift. However, after many enjoyable auditions I came to the conclusion that the strength of the music lay in what wasn’t there, which probably doesn’t make much sense if you haven’t heard the music. What I’m saying is that there’s this enticing tension in the music in which you’re constantly listening to find what lies deeper inside the music. All you know is that it’s there – something like the light in the fridge scenario.

But I’ll stop trying to look for comparisons. The music stands well on its own terms – Idea Fire Company are on to something very unique here.

The players are:-

Scott Faust

Meara O’Reilly

Jessi Leigh Swenson

Karla Borecky

Frans de Waard

Dr Timothy Shortell

Graham Lambkin