The internal and the external interplay—birdsong, thistles, mills, taverns and hostelries, the pots and pans dangling from a tinker’s cart, toys, raindrops, and happenstances.
Sound, as it wobbles through the air, can be the most suggestive of energy. But the listening experience, mixed with one’s own thoughts, memories and imaginings, can have a transformative effect on how it is heard. Orla Wren, the dreadlocked English sonic carpenter known only as Tui, recorded his source material during an extended trek into the Spanish wilderness. Delicately arranged into Soil Steps, I hear some medieval pilgrim as she measures her steps along the road from Roncesvalles to Santiago de Compostela, “discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed,” as Italo Calvino characterized a different journey between invisible cities. The internal and the external interplay—birdsong, thistles, mills, taverns and hostelries, the pots and pans dangling from a tinker’s cart, toys, raindrops, and happenstances. A truck drives by. Hatches open, doors creak, tubs are thumped and confidences are just barely snatched out of the air in a Chaucerian panorama.
Orla Wren’s compositions are complemented by Eva Puyuelo’s (formerly of Savath & Savalas) bilingual interjections among the other snippets of conversation picked up along the way. Though painstakingly wrought, the piece features only a few instrumental touch ups, with khen flute and a Korg Monotron synthesizer plus an electric guitar played by Cyril Secq, heard as if on an ancient 78 slab.
Soil Steps opens with the sacral ambience of a vaulted cathedral stuffed with a stock of muttered past prayers. Gradually, the inside becomes the outside, a pair of feet and a staff parting long, morning-dewed grass, the journey begun to the knock-knock of the woodpecker and violin looping like counted rosary beads. A last-gasping harmonium is overtaken by a mechanical trundle like the advent of the industrial revolution. Well-heeled shoes strike a cobblestoned high street and a music box winds down sweetly among market chatter. Fading in and out are radio waves and static. A wheel of fortune spins. Another morning dawn, a smithy works some iron, the birds announce their locations and dispositions, Puyuelo’s voice is chopped and glitched.
Thus the first third of Orla Wren’s tale. Soil Steps is a sophisticated ambient-field recording hybrid, a travelogue of artisanal attention to detail seamlessly dovetailing the electric and the acoustic into something time-evocative (paradoxically, by suggesting different eras) and timeless, eclectic and profound, like a very good novel.
Soil Steps is available on Oak Editions.
