- Steve Peters :: Filtered Light (Chamber Music 4) (CD-R)
- Brittle Stars / Yann Novak :: Long Distance Vol. 3 (CD-R 3″)
(06.08.08) Explorer of acoustic phenomena, Steve Peters, has conceived a new take on chamber music. It’s not Music for Chambers but by chambers – the empty rooms in which his installations are exhibited being miked and milked for liminal ambient resonances. Sounds from empty rooms are minimally manipulated and then recycled. Peters’ pieces are presented under the banner of being “primarily engaged with issues of place, presence, perception, attention, and duration.” The sceptic might dismiss this as art-bollocks, and, sure, there ain’t nothing like a smarty-pants artistic mission statement to provide a smokescreen behind which the artist-onanist can legitimate indulgence of a solipsistic habit. This is not intended as criticism of Peters in particular, but fair warning should be given that just as the presence of academic-art music is announced by its textual accompaniment, so within the first few minutes of Filtered Light all but the most intrepid of listening explorers will likely find themselves “engaged with issues” of their own in the face of such musically challenging – and challenged – work.
So let academic material be given sympathetic academic treatment. Materials: University of New Mexico Art Museum. Spartan slivers of ambient airwave-forms, drawn only from the life of the room itself or leakage from outside. Method: fourteen filtered frequencies are turned to thirty-two and rearranged randomly. Results: simple placid flows of pitched sonorities of relatively unassuming texturality emerge, spend time just being there individually, sometimes rubbing up against each other. Discussion: The rooms’ inarticulate speech seems to struggle towards theme and rheme in the in-between of two frequencies, as long thin prosaic sustains are punctuated by essays at poetic detail – virtual marimba-esque water drops, sonar spectra, and some dot-dash dot-dash dot-dash. The low-event nature of the provisions demands that the listener make more of a meal of it, actively constructing his/her own Music of the Walls. Conclusion: each will then make of this what they will – the connections and disjunctions of Peters’ material may be served up into an individual meaty micro-feast or, equally, may induce fast. It is interesting to note that both were experienced here, and in successive plays.
Third installment in Dragon’s Eye’s 3″ CD-R series, Long Distance, pairing up artists who have never before met or worked together, features a collab between Yann Novak and Kev Rolfe (whose nom du disque is rendered variably – Brittle Stars on the dinky 3″ CD-r sleeve, but Brittle Star on the possibly more authoritative Dragon’s Eye website). Recorded during Novak’s sojourn in Manchester, it hosts a single 21-minute track, “Melody to Maelstrom,” which could almost be the antidote to Filtered Light‘s paucity of fibre and fizz. New kid on the DE block, Stars, does well to hook himself up with DE boss, Novak, to choreograph up some fascinating flurries of of space dust into the aether to enrapture the aural cloud-watcher. Delicately teeming with pulse and fibrillation and roamed under by a resonant hum from the deep, the sound field slowly opens out its architectures to an incoming fog of something new. Melody! Having been ushered in, its progression is quietly interfered with, turned here into soft swells and billows of tuned air, there into abraded textures of fuzz and crackle, while all the while maintaining a tenuous connection with its melodic essence. Having dissipated into the eponymous maelstrom, it re-gathers itself as it ebbs away for a final quiet recommitment to fading melody. To be located near names like Fennesz and Hecker and others pursuing MBV-derived digital dissolution such as Krankyite, Keith Fullerton Whitman, or indeed DE label-mates, Wyndel Hunt and Son of Rose. Long Distance Vol. 3’s engrossing 21 minutes leaves in the air a tingle of just-reached fulfilment and a frisson of expectation that hour-long recordings cannot achieve – a small vindication for the cute but not entirely loved 3″ format.
Filtered Light (Chamber Music 4) and Long Distance Vol. 3 are both out now on Dragon’s Eye. [Purchase]