Breidden Hill

I have a feeling there must be other ways of working with sound, ways which would allow one to be more accurate, more true to the inner world suspended within the larger world, not just an individuals inner world, but what lies within the world itself, what is essential to it and does not depend on us. Finding a means of working with sound that can bring us back to our first experience of entering the world, making it immediate and at the same time renewing it, returning, as it were, to its sources.

Jeph Jerman | Tom Cox

Jeph Jerman and Tom Cox — if/when

if/when comes housed in a compelling handmade box containing mushroom prints, the cd itself, and various organic matter. A profitable collaboration that involved Tom sending various recordings to Jeph who then reconstituted and playfully juggled them into their individual selves. I highly recommend looking inside this box as the cd plays itself out, as, to me, the box acts as a microcosm of Jeph’s milieu.

Whilst attempting to describe what I have heard on this disc, my grasp of words, such as it is, seems all too misleading. So I fall upon images and visual analogies that I hope might shed some light upon how I feel about this release.

The first two tracks align themselves to visual scenes, presented differently each time I listen through. Images of invertebrates burrowing in the soil beside a constant stream of traffic, time-lapse footage of plants growing (with the sound of the film crew left in the mix), walking into a restaurant and sticking one’s head into a deep fat fryer where the sounds heard blend together, slowly vying for autonomy, and the food in the fryer scratches and pulls against the sides of the machine creating various internal soundworlds. The next two tracks bring to mind the previously mentioned microcosms once more, observing lilliputian aeolian villages where the vehicles are blown along by the wind, creating all manner of scratches and whistles, and peering through the window of Andrei Tarkovsky’s model house in The Sacrifice, as if sound emanates from the reflected light that catches your ears.

if/when is full of inspired auditory strata. It is a world of quasi-communication where energy harnessed is never dormant, but under a constant state of calibration.

Field recordings, auditory documentation, whatever you wish to call them, have come a long way in the last decade, and if listening to if/when evokes the precarious motion of stepping from rock to rock, observing the mosses underfoot, then the first two tracks of @stuk remind me that it’s all too easy to forget everyday objects and their inherent sonic worth.

skymaps

If I haven't anything in my mind, then what shall I do. Under bushes and water.

Tarab - Take all the ships from the harbour and sail them straight to hell

Tarab — Take all the ships from the harbour, and sail them straight into hell.

Oscillation, metal scraping on metal, dragged, large space, little sounds, pushing and pulling, drawing sounds from a well, giving way to a larger atmosphere, looks upwards, the movements made in the space, following ears and eyes, sense of touch, crunching and crackling, ebbs and flows, capturing dead industry, utilising abnormal machinery, thousands of automatons, mechanical insects, strata of life, the industry and the soil, breeds intrigue, 7:07, gives way to gradual silence, the reverberation of fricative liquids and solids, what has been, starts up, as if the mechanical insects are building from scratch the sounds of the distant sea, playing derelict objects, creating imagery that conjures their original purpose, beautiful hyperbolic crackles, 10:10, white noise, a switch to real insects, are they insects? Evolution of sound material, insects oscillating like drones reminiscent of the discs commencement, entomophobia, tunnels, passed out, miasma, life above, next layer, clamour of the upper levels seeping onto your skull, down the indented walls, are sounds coming towards you or are you going towards the sounds? Reoccurring crunching, heard with your eyes, realignment, looking up, again an open manhole cover, sparks of electricity hitting the dead concrete, what is the equivalent auditory terminology of a silent film? Relief 21:24, auditory storyboard, light, humorous, head sinking into a record player, intensely natural transition, each facet of each atmosphere is so real, so much so, it becomes harder and harder to quiet your mind, the thousands of imagistic unions.

Album cover acts as a graphic score.

Wind drenched landscape, recorded through a bottle, through a wall, a vacuum, the outside world heard through a beehive, inside out, complementarity, ectosymbiosis, felt through the senses of bacteria, auditory ecotone, saline meets fresh, attracting new life, ancient vessels rotting inside the whale, hulls rubbing against its rib bones, the blow hole of the whale creating a cyclic push and pull, enhancing the decay and rot, infrasound made audible, croaking beams, vast unseen patterns, microcosm of said images returning overhead, positive feedback, a fugue of micro and macro, each continually altering the others perspective, 37:02, torrential rain ends the story, drowning out all traces, leaving no remnants, an empty stomach to be filled with pistol shrimp, filters, a flock of birds heard through a wooden leg, temperature ebbs, ravenous birds dig at your feet, slowly engulfing. Listening through a tube whilst inside a tube, auditory retraction, cymatics, shapes form inside the tubes, sharp, a mended ear, feedback system, correlating information all over a series of circuits, receive as soon as send as soon as receive until such meanings are non-existent, roofs of the circuit in flux, naive realism, everywhere at once, vacant estates, drawing breath, a slow night, enclosed in a box, no ears, lead snow.

http://www.23five.org/tarab/