There’s a feel of an arcane minimal ritual—woozy, somewhat spooked, at times inducing a sense of disquiet deriving from the sepulchral provenance of the sounding sources, perhaps even more so when Whetham leaves their clay mouths un[a/e]ffected.
Intriguing site-specific work by Simon Whetham, who has for some time been forging expansive soundscapes, largely using manipulated field recordings. Over the last decade the Bristol-based sonician has elaborated an extensive body of work across a variety of experimental labels like Line, Dragon’s Eye, and Mystery Sea. From the Mouths of Clay is product of participation in the inaugural residency of a lab project curated by the Museo Universitario de la Universidad de Antioquia and Casa Tres Patios in Medellín, Colombia, where he had space and opportunity to develop his methods. Whetham’s spirit of inquiry here extends into the acoustic and phenomenological qualities of the gallery space and faulty/used equipment from a nearby market, La Cascada, utilizing a process attributable to Alvin Lucier‘s canonic I am Sitting in a Room applied to a selection of 3 prehispanic burial urns and three unidentified ‘examples of more recent variations on this theme.’
The burial urns were transmuted through procedural capture of their architectures as resonant bodies, their resonances played back inside via small speakers, or through them using transducers, the process then repeated to extract tones held within the clay and the internal space. Each of the six vessels thus gave voice from their own mouths, two speakers playing lower tones created by them using the same process, with a mike inside each and a larger speaker placed against the outside. The resulting hour-long audio-document of sounds from the installation and further findings from the residency period manifests in dread drone mutations, creeping organ-like pitches that susurrate and crepitate as they swell and relent in pitch and intensity. It’s a haunting via objects of revenance in dread-inflected assonances and dissonances within and without that dissolve into infinity. A woozy flow floats forth through prevailing doom-laden lows with ephemeral noise striations and abrasive percussive flurries.
Overall, there’s a feel of an arcane minimal ritual—woozy, somewhat spooked, at times inducing a sense of disquiet deriving from the sepulchral provenance of the sounding sources, perhaps even more so when Whetham leaves their clay mouths un[a/e]ffected. A fascinating bit of aural meditation that may or not be a reflection on death as ever-present process.
From the Mouths of Clay is out now on The Helen Scarsdale Agency.
