While The Red Fish Sleeps is an engagingly queasy immersion in mystery seas teeming with spectral eldritch presence, accompanying text from Beckett providing further anchorage for a hymn to disintegration and transubstantiation.
Ben Fleury-Steiner self-describes as ‘an unabashed moody experimentalist drawn especially to flows between hypnotic micro-sounds and vast aural wholes,’ providing ‘opportunities for deep listening.’ His ‘deep listening,’ mind, is situated in a paradigm that’s more Oöphoi DIY than branded Pauline Oliveiros. For his latest, While The Red Fish Sleeps, Fleury-Steiner, man of protean moniker (Paradin, Light of Shipwreck, From the White Chimneys) and shifting imprint (Low Point, Infraction, Rural Colours, Gears of Sand, taâlem, Umbra, Peasant Magik, Reverb Worship, Mystery Sea, to name but a few), stays plain old Ben, but moves to new lodgings–Belgium-based Soft Corridor, whose releases are ltd. ed. runs in winsome packaging with photos by owner, Julien Lambrechts, and illustrations by Jess Pauwels.
The artist playfully posits: ‘What if Tarkovsky and Malick co-directed a remake of The Old Man and the Sea and Nurse with Wound and Alio Die were cast in sonic drag as Santiago,’ (author’s note: and maybe Murmer and Mirror as extras?) Rather than sounds as vague topographic signifiers (cf. Clearings and The Places That Find You), Fleury-Steiner has consciously returned to oceanic sounds (cf. Flesh of Caverns) ‘recalled from sense impressions and memory fragments […] allowing for a kind of soundtrack to emerge,’ with ‘a much more explicit embrace of the surreal.’ What that translates to is an oceanic dérive through three long inky tracts of post-industrial-inflected vortices, enveloping modulations and tenebrous layers peppered with chthonic thuds; and a short slippery customer alive with with clatter-clutter (“White Moth Arcade”) that detains our drifting disquiet momentarily before we’re borne off again. The rise-fall swell-relent drone-ocean is infused with a slew of shifting detritus, water sluicing on seashore, a blunted tintinnabulation redolent of constant pressure a notable leitmotif. Fleury-Steiner’s Red Fish in its somnific sweep over the murk and chill of the ocean floor skirts some iridescent borders; his soundscapes draw us in as slumbering piscine, adrift in caustic and claustrophobic currents, with more heimlich timbres seeking periodically to bring us back to center, albeit one that cannot hold.
Overall, While The Red Fish Sleeps is an engagingly queasy immersion in mystery seas teeming with spectral eldritch presence, accompanying text from Beckett providing further anchorage for a hymn to disintegration and transubstantiation.
‘Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate, and drift through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me’ (Samuel Beckett, From an Abandoned Work)
While The Red Fish Sleeps is available on Soft Corridor.
https://vimeo.com/118023906
