Clément crafts a sonorous dome of bronze arching over a close reading of rusting iron and crumbling concrete, an obsolete infrastructure heaving a final, fatigued sigh. Music that sounds the same in the dark as with the lights on.
[Release page] Soundscaper Joda Clément was inspired at an early age by his father’s farming in the Northern Ontario wilderness with nothing but a generator to supply the necessary electricity. It seems its hum has remained with him ever since. Perhaps he heard the entire planet humming, and set out to document it.
For much of the time leading up to the Industrial Revolution, scientific scholarship reconceived the earth as a great, big, unfeeling machine mankind could make work for him by mining it, dominating it, and exploiting its riches in order to grease the wheels of human economy, dethroning the concept of the planet as living nurturer. The Narrows sounds like that clockwork earth; although Clément records the urban envirnoment, he hears it as a logical extension of wilderness—just with more people and contraptions around.
On his earlier release on Unfathomless’ mother label Mystey Sea as The Cherry Beach Project, he explored the malevolent resonances of an abandoned industrial storage silo on Toronto’s waterfront. Although most of the sounds on The Narrows have been collected in Toronto and its hinterland, this is site specific only in the sense that it merges what grew to be an enormous archive into a single, thirty-five minute mass that ”seemed to take on a life of its own.” It is like an abstract oil painting in which texture, not colour and shape, is the central, narrative element. Clément crafts a sonorous dome of bronze arching over a close reading of rusting iron and crumbling concrete, an obsolete infrastructure heaving a final, fatigued sigh. Music that sounds the same in the dark as with the lights on.
The Narrows is available on Unfathomless. [Release page]
