Chris Watson - Stepping Into The Dark (Touch, 1996)

1 Low Pressure (3:46)
2 Embleton Rookery (4:24)
3 The Crossroads (5:02)
4 River Mara At Dawn (6:27)
5 River Mara At Night (4:59)
6 A Passing View (1:51)
7 Bosque Seco (9:03)
8 Sunsets (5:02)
9 The Blue Men Of The Minch (4:51)
10 High Pressure (5:13)
11 Gahlitzerstrom (4:05)
12 The Forest Path (4:52)

Field recordings non retravaillés...

The thing I really love about Chris Watson is that his recordings are not 'merely' field recordings. There is something inherently lazy about so much field recording, where artists tend to look to filling a passage of time rather than really listen to the sounds and the textures they are capturing - not so with Chris Watson. The British sound recording expert who honed his talents working with the Hafler Trio and Cabaret Voltaire (before being snapped up by the BBC as a wildlife recorder) seems to have an inexplicable ability to capture environmental sound as music. These are simple, unprocessed recordings yet are more captivating to listen to than so much straight music out there. Although there are plenty of wildlife recordings on offer here (the most striking being the birds and insects of 'River Mara at Dawn') there is nothing trite or cynical about Watson's work. Watson treats the call of a bird or the fluttering of a dragonfly's wings as a layer or instrument in his piece and you get the feeling that these recordings were selected from hours and hours of work. In my opinion Watson is at the absolute top of his game, and these recordings are simply incomparable to anyone else working within the genre right now. Totally essential listening...
Boomkat

sold out visit Touch

try

Jacob Kirkegaard - Eldfjall (Touch, 2005)

1 Ala (6:12)
2 Gaea (7:10)
3 Nerthus (1:43)
4 Coatlicue (3:45)
5 Al-Lat (2:44)
6 Aramaiti (2:55)
7 Izanami (5:12)
8 Kali (3:19)
9 Gerd (3:24)

Ce disque est constitué de field recordings enregistrés dans les régions de Krisuvik, Geysir et Myvatn en Islande pour documenter les activités géothermique, les micros ayant été enterrés autour de geysers...

Danish musician and sound-sculpter Jakob Kirkegaard is interested in the sounds that most people will never get the chance to hear. In addition to collaborating with lots of different artists over the course of the past couple years (including Philip Jeck), he has put together an increasingly interesting body of work of sounds he has captured in a natural environment using homemade and experimental microphones. These spaces include many different locations that are known for their desolation, including deserts, volcanic earth, ice, and nuclear power plants.

Eldfjall is his newest release and like his other recent work focuses in on a rather specific body of sound sources. The release consists of geothermal recordings of vibrations in the ground around the area of Krisuvik, Geysir, and Myvatn in Iceland recorded using an array of accelerometers and vibration sensor microphones. The result is a release that is jittery and alive at times and still and droning at others, a bizarre slice of sonic life from under the surface of the group from an island known for its geothermal activity.

The biggest question one probably wants to know the answer to regarding work like this is whether it's listenable, and like a lot of difficult music, that answer to that will probably change depending on the person. "Ala" opens with a dark, droning rumble before shifting off into a stereo-shifting piece of soft gurgling splashes while "Gaea" opens with what sounds like the faint blipping readouts of a machine measuring some sort of activity (not quite geiger-clicky, but close) before drifting into a softer droning section that gains in intensity like an encroaching wind coming down a mine shaft.

Elsewhere, the recording is much more alive and even noisy as "Nerthus" percolates with sections of crispy noise while "Kali" seems to batter the microphone with a steady wash of sound that sounds like water during a particularly heavy boil. In a strictly musical sense, the gurgling undertones of "Al-Lat" would probably tickle the ears of just about any ambient music fan. As a whole Eldfjall is an interesting document, but as a whole the sound portraits just don't vary that much. Most tracks contain some sort of liquid gurgling-type sound and the overall range is from peaceful to rapid and overdriven, while the frequency range is most often lacking any sort of low-end (which is odd, considering the actual sub-earth sounds recorded). If you're a person who finds field-recording and the specifics and even scientifics of it interesting, you'll probably want to seek this release out, but if you're looking for something more musical, there are better places to look in the Touch catalogue.

Almost Cool Music Review

buy

try

Biosphere - Autour de la Lune (Touch, 2004)

1 Translation (21:43)
2 Rotation (11:08)
3 Modifié (5:10)
4 Vibratoire (3:36)
5 Déviation (10:26)
6 Circulaire (6:15)
7 Disparu (2:26)
8 Inverse (5:32)
9 Tombant (8:07)

Il y a des oeuvres auxquelles une écoute distraite ne peut rendre justice. L'élégant minimalisme d'Autour de la Lune prend tout son sens à plein volume, lorsque la communion entre l'auditeur et l'artiste est totale et absolue. Commande conjointe de la Délégation aux arts plastiques, du Ministère de la Culture et de l'Atelier de création radiophonique de France Culture, Autour de la Lune est le résultat sonore d'une plongée de Geir Jenssen dans les archives de Radio-France au bout de laquelle le musicien norvégien décida d'employer des extraits d'une vieille adaptation radio d'un roman de Jules Vernes afin de créer un hommage aux sombres profondeurs spatiales.

Ne soyez pas surpris si l'un de vos amis aux sensibilités cosmiques plus exacerbées vous explique qu'il a réussi à synchroniser l'un des neuf mouvements du nouveau Biosphere avec une scène du 2001 de Kubrick. Autour de la Lune est une oeuvre à la fois hautement abstraite et remarquablement imagée dont la représentation du gouffre spatial frappe autant par sa grandeur infinie que par son profond calme. Jenssen offre ici une ambitieuse composition conceptuelle qui oscille entre la sublime prétention et la beauté immaculée. Se nourrissant à même ses larges silences et ses drones aériens longs et contemplatifs, Autour de la Lune n'est pas la plus accessible des créations du musicien norvégien.

Au niveau de la pure correspondance au concept, on a affaire à un travail de maitre. Le premier mouvement, Translation, est une remarquable construction planante à souhait où les différentes plages atmosphériques s'entremêlent pour créer un fascinant mur de sonorités spatiales qui respire le calme absolu. Les craquements analogiques et les respirations synthétiques continuent de s'enchevêtrer sur l'inquiétante Rotation. Modifié est la pièce qui trahit le plus les origines radiophoniques de l'expérience. Jeu de fréquences et de fritures, c'est le moment le plus ouvertement humain de cette odyssée de l'espace.

Lourdes basses subsoniques et silences habités sont au rendez-vous à chaque détour de cette symphonie de manipulations subtiles et de drones engourdis. Et, tout comme dans le classique de Kubrick, tout semble ici se dérouler au ralenti. Plusieurs des échantillons employés ici proviennent directement d'enregistrements faits à partir de la station orbitale MIR. C'est dire à quel point cette musique à la fois sinistre et reposante ne laisse pas de place aux séquences d'action.

Cela dit, toute cette poésie personnelle est-elle une réelle représentation sonore de l'expérience cosmique? Ce que je tente de poser comme question va plus ou moins comme suit: si Biosphere, au lieu de s'inspirer de De la Terre à la Lune, avait décidé d'intituler cette composition 20,000 lieues sous les mers, me serais-je évertué à vanter les mérites de cette fascinante odyssée sous-marine? Peu importe. Ceux qui ont l'imagination et la concentration nécessaire pour suivre Geir Jenssen jusqu'aux plus profonds des méandres de l'espace trouveront ici une trame sonore fascinante à leurs rêveries. Les autres que ce genre de musique métaphysique irrite diront que, plus que jamais, le Norvégien est perdu dans les étoiles.
Funki Music

Albums like this should come embossed with the warning, “Do not play on crummy little speakers.” Biosphere (a.k.a. Geir Jenssen) makes music that you feel as well as hear. A native of Tromso, Norway, Jenssen uses the Biosphere alias whenever he goes to work in the ambient music mines, and he dug up some especially heavy ore to mold Autour de la Lune.

That may seem ironic given its title, which translates as “Around the moon.” But this is not weightless music; indeed, the central three-track sequence – “Vibratoire,” “Déviation,” and “Circulaire” – sit quite heavily on the chest; subsonic bass frequencies are like that.

Why all the French, one asks? The album is a refinement of a piece that Jenssen composed for Radio France Culture which took its inspiration and some of its raw material from an early-’60s audio realization of Jules Verne’s story De la Terre à la Lune. The opener “Translation” lasts nearly 22 minutes; built from pulsing, looped organ tones, it develops a tension so absorbing it could stand perfectly fine on its own as an EP. But there’s more.

The long, glassy resonations on “Rotation” evoke most overtly space’s vast emptiness. They also set up the record’s loveliest moment, “Modifié,” a masterpiece of shortwave manipulation. Its smudged voices and rusted metal beats materialize out of crackling fog as eerily as anything on The Conet Project. Then comes the album’s aforementioned center of gravity, the series of chest-compression exercises.

Coherent, complete, and not a minute too long despite a running time of almost 75, Autour de la Lune is a deeply affecting and unabashedly lovely recording.
By Bill Meyer, Dusted Review

buy

try