1 Holzbock
2 Baracken
3 Überfahrt
4 Adlerstraße
5 Hans-Werner
6 Azuma
The fidelity and ease of compact discs (and, subsequently, of digital audio, as embodied, or at least epitomized, by MP3s) has taken John Cage’s famous realizations about the nature of silence and turned them outward. Now that the absurdity of the concept of pure silence is commonly appreciated, we use field recordings to explore the sounds that are actually there, however remote they may be. Giesela’s Weiß doesn’t even try to make good on its enticing subtitle ("Field recordings and melodicas"), but it more than makes up for that image of a Caribbean sound art by taking raw audio and transforming it into casual soundscapes without ever fully losing the sense of the original material. The opening track, "Holzbock", is at first so near-silent you’d think we might have to wait for a subsequent recordist to wander along and make something of it, but then the creaks of an old house start up and you might find yourself pining for the calmness that had come before. "Überfahrt" uses scraps of cello to develop a lilting backdrop amid percussive punctuations. Tellingly, several of Giesela’s sources involve children. "Baracken", quietly, employs a child’s voice, before vaporizing into a suite of white noise figments, and two others, "Adlerstraße" and "Azuma", contain "textures" from a "T. Siefert Children-Soundensemble." The last of these is a delightful mix of wooden wind chimes and tertiary space tones that’s like the encapsulation of the perfect weekend morning. Together they promote a sense of wonder that’s captivating and, occasionally, more than a little scary.
e/i magazineLuckily things fall on good ground with the last release, by Giesela, whom we met before, in Vital Weekly 523, as Giesela Rot, aka Marc Riek, the man behind the label. His release is subtitled ‘Field Recordings And Melodicas’, by which he doesn’t mean literally melodicas, but more ‘the other sounds also used and given to me by my friends’, which means sounds of a cello and children, which pop up in various tracks. Riek himself is responsible for the field recordings used here. In the six pieces these sounds are put together in a kind of microsounding way. Silent, careful, inaudible but also warm and digital. Its a release to keep your full attention with, other you’d miss out on something. Throughout the music is quite intense, even when it’s not always finding new paths to walk along. It certainly stands out from the previous two.
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