A trio of recordings from Dragon’s Eye that maintains the reputation of Yann Novak’s minimal electronica and sound art house for covering all points north of experimental. The three on view here span the breadth of DE’s concept and sound – from the organic-electronic hybrids of Mem1 & Stephen Vitiello to the evacuated installation spaces of Mimosa|Moise, and the enigmatic lowlight drone-poems of Chubby Wolf.
First up, the teeming Age of Insects, which finds Mem1 with electronicist Stephen Vitiello communing in dialogue analogue and digital, converging field recordings and instrumental performance. Fuelled by sound-visions of extinct insects, cello-electronics fusers Mark and Laura Cetilia propose a post-production pact with Vitiello, skimping on afters to savour some of the real-time flavours from the studio session mains. The album’s sonic habit seems to stem as much from this decision to lay off as much as to intervene; earth and air, organic, as if a semiotic of imagined mandible chatter. These electro-acoustic microsound sculptures are given their head, cast in textures of oil and grit, a caustic scrim of sinetone sputter, tenebrous hum and thrum. “Cascoplecia” and “Ektatotricha” set the tone with zoom-ins and pans across an insectoid microcosmos, in which all manner of flute’n’flutter and creepy crawl’n’scuttle range through woozy mid-range drone wormholes, tumbling into fetid chambers of alien unquiet. “Vosila” takes a different turn, a felicitous encounter of natural and electronic that tosses the cello’s throaty bowings and keening scrapes in a crepitating sweet and sour soup. “Paleophaedon” takes some sci-fi blips and whirrs for a walk in the black Kosmische forest at the edge of the twilight zone to a remote headachey feedback and pulse backdrop. Low-frequency detail is especially engaging in the final “Monura” and “Electrinocellia,” both possessed of an appealing strangeness with a touch of something almost plangent, perhaps signifying an elegy for the extinction of these invertebrate ancients. Sonorities may lose individuality, especially when cello states are altered to buzz-tone and fuzz-drone; generally, though, Age of Insects retains a certain resonant character through its mix of electroacousticacoustic and concrète with transient melodic and rhythmic detail, ensuring a satisfying sonic envisioning of concept.
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A less happy synergy is to be found in the sound of Mimosa|Moise and their Hear One Near and Think of the Other. Here all the conceptual heft seems to have been exercised in articulation of programme and process, trailing a product that, frankly, strikes as all sound-art mouth and no musical trousers. A concern for matters of memory, time and space has become a trope of experimental ambient in recent years, as has a self-reflexive fixation with matters perceptual – a leitmotif, in fact, of some of the more avant of Dragons Eye’s sound artisans. Such concerns can be and have been fertile drivers of rich and immersive sound works, but, with the best of intentions and dispositions towards those twin totems of contemporary sound art – experiment and concept, there are times when one’s ears cannot but founder on a certain dissonance between the well-turned articulation of concept and the meagre fare of its realization. Lucia H. Chung and Martin J. Thompson purport to explore ‘their experiences with sound as it is perceived,’ their wish being ‘to convey sound as a language, expressing to the other a sharing of a moment where sound becomes more than just sounding.’ They further write of ‘A present moment rolling into and inspiring the next. A moment existing in-between the passing and the approaching, linked yet unique.’ For this, ‘work aiming to share, contribute and take pleasure in the small, the brief, the passing, the approaching and the now,’ they were apparently inspired by ‘the small and seemingly insignificant moments experienced and shared by us all.’ The patchwork of promo quotes is not included here in a sneering spirit, but to illustrate an indulgence in the pleasures of the text that stands in stark contrast to its audio counterpart, whose sonorous habit presents so lowercase as to make the listener wonder at times if the disc might have involuntarily ejected. Sharp dry tonalities effect a desultory on-off communion with thin sinetones, forming a patchy patina to a bodiless below. The differing emplacement of these sounds, sometimes up close, other times as if occluded, proposes a sonic architecture that undeniably enacts one of the aims of the original installation. The embrace of liminality and silence, however, does not come easy, at least for this listener, and the sheer corporeality of the odd low-end incursion comes as blessed relief; a drone, however turned, in such a context, becomes a small sensual oasis in a desert of depletion and aridity.
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Back on terra, if not firma, then at least somewhat musically cognita, there’s a first DE release for Chubby Wolf. For the uninitiated, behind the cutesy-playful nom de disque is Danielle Baquet-Long, half of ambient-drone-postclassical couple as was, Celer. Los que No Son Gentos bears some of the hallmarks of her previous work, the attendant air of mystery being one of the most notable, along with a vague sense of loss and absence – an inevitable presence in her works following her sad, still felt, demise. If anything, the collection manifests a more timbrally austere sound palette than usual for this already tonally-retentive practitioner; less immediately alluring, kind of blue in tenor, if you will, with a smouldering slightly airless quality. You’ll find no grandiose postclassical string-sweeps here, but rather distanced cadences cast in spent colours – more of a Dying Star or a Nacreous Clouds than a Discourses of the Withered or an Engaged Touches, for the Celer-acquainted. In line with the title’s evocation of nullity, of a certain lacuna, the suggestive track titles with their allusive poesis enfold vaporous miniatures, wrought from laptopped’n’tailed bass, analogue synths, bells, voice, flirting with total effacement, so slender are the means of sonic production. They play out, no sooner there than gone, like variations on a theme to some sublit ceremonial. Were something more Celer-y to be invoked it would be the Stunned Honey Moon, with its ambiguous loop-plays teetering on the edges of binaries warm-cold dark-light consonant-dissonant. But set against a track such as “Prelude to a Come-On,” you register the inky tremors of its timbres, the oblique strategies of its spectral harmonics, and realize its total otherness, with a shivery frisson in the face of this peculiar presence with absence inside.
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All releases above are out now on Dragon’s Eye. [Facebook]
