Manja Ristic and Murmer — The Scaffold (Unfathomless)
Here is a remarkable and rare take on the art of collaboration. To call Manja Ristic and Patrick Tubin McGinley, who is known as Murmer, field recording practitioners is almost as misleading as it is to call these two odysseys collaborations, true but not the truth. Both artists freeze the verity of liquid instants and then render them calmly molten, transforming size and proximity into a syntax all their own. While most collaborations involve a concerto approach in which identity switches pride of place from moment to moment, The Scaffold is an exquisitely powerful melding out of which narrative rivers flow.
We’re told that Ristic and Murmer worked from 2020-2022 on this palimpsestic immersion, recording using sound sources from Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Estonia. Like the album’s title though, those locations are only means to a sonically inclusive end. Murmer describes the difficulties of capturing a scaffold “singing,” a wonderfully anthropomorphic descriptor that might just as easily be applied to every sound and space opened up as the music eases onward. Michael Pisaro’s groundbreaking Transparent City series laid the groundwork for this “musical” transfiguration of place, or environment, and we hear that process as room tones are augmented in “zamišljena sjena vjetra”’s opening moments. Tone, point and timbre converge in increasing and amalgamating contrapuntal layers, each sound containing and negating its environment, scaffolding to construct a new one. The mechanical sounds and attendant squeaks beginning at 7:54 transform themselves into birdsong in listener perception, just as isolated rain drops lend their pitches to delicately aperiodic rhythmic occurrences beginning at 2:01 of the second piece, “kaugpääs; antenn.” Those sounds and their outcomes unify the pieces, individually and as a pair, various shades of rushing water ultimately taking on the characteristics of a busy speech-scape or the morphing drone perfectly complemented by the singing scaffold as it supports the first piece’s second half.
Magical moments abound. What is that gorgeous shift of focus, that transparent but iridescently pitched liquid, foregrounded with glassy certainty at 13:14 of the first piece, dead-center of the soundstage and highlighting the sonic clusters surrounding it? Can there be anything more ravishingly reverberant than those multi-frequency interjections 2:07 into the second piece? In their echoing repetition, they prefigure the best of all, the Requiem chant coalescing symbiotically with all that has preceded it but sitting comfortably behind it, worlds within worlds in transcendent correspondence, a support system as uneasy but as natural as the rush of voices and motorized life that brings the album from church to town in a life-affirming conclusion. These days, there’s little chance of a bad recording. What’s done with the recordings is the crux of each situation, and The Scaffold is a winner at all levels.
Bruno Duplant & David Vélez—des-illusions (Unfathomless)
des-illusions by Bruno Duplant & David Vélez
Sound artists Bruno Duplant and David Vélez are well matched. Each is an artist whose work processes the world around them and their reactions to it. And they share an awareness of the personal dimensions of collaborative creation. Duplant, a multi-instrumentalist and composer from France, has made scores that doubled as letters to the artist who has expressed interest in performing said score. And Vélez, a Colombian who has recently spent several years studying in England, made his understanding of the tension between Duplant’s hopelessness about humanity’s prospects and the defiant hopefulness expressed by making new work a guiding force in his contributions to des-illusions.
According to the album’s liner notes, which you can read on its Bandcamp page, the impetus for this collaboration was a conversation the two men had about making music in a time of environmental and social crisis. Collected sounds — birdsong, bugs, rain, running water, the conversations of passing people, machinery — figure prominently in the two-part, 43-minute-long piece, which is bisected so evenly (the running times are exactly 22:00 and 21:00) that one suspects that this CD might once have been planned to be an LP. But so do played sounds, particularly pulsing and tolling synthesizer voices. Both have been subjected to interventions, having been looped, chopped and filtered so that their combinations constitute a sound environment quite distinct from the ones that were sampled to make it. The played sounds don’t mix with the environmental ones so much as they bob on top or alongside them, which might represent the relationship between humans and the world they strive to manipulate and manage. But if this is a soundtrack to our currently combusting world, it imposes a very specific combination of moods, simultaneously forlorn and persistent.
The experience of this recording may be modified by skipping the accompanying notes. Separated from their description of intent, this music’s crepuscular vibe might dominate, and hip sleep specialists could plausibly prescribe it as a possible aid for those seeking slumber. This is not, however, a failure on the part of the work to communicate, but evidence that the collaborative impulses that brought it into existence include the listener.
Upon seeing Daniel Crokaert’s cover art for VI, one thing is abundantly clear: this is the most bleached image in the extensive Unfathomless discography. The shades bring to mind whitewashed walls and whale bones, the release number U91 blending into the center left hues, the strong yet lower-case title – closing. period included, direct center.
VI follows suit: smudged, abraded, time-worn.…
As an avid collector of sea glass, I walk the shore in search of sharp edges made smooth. But until this month, I had never heard of a parallel pursuit: the search for sea brick. As he was recovering from an abusive relationship, Brandon Auger spent countless hours scouring the rocky shoreline of Point Pleasant Park, eventually accumulating 104 pieces of broken brick, seeing them as metaphors…
One seldom thinks about holes unless one falls into them. contre-montagne is all about holes, specifically those of Montreal. According to Anne-F Jacques, the entire city “was created by digging holes: removing stones from the ground, then making buildings with them.” Holes seldom exist for long before someone considers filling them: with trash, with dirt, and in this case, with snow.
The…
fish point is a gorgeous meditation on place and time, one that bemoans what has been lost and celebrates what still exists. Recorded in Portland, Maine, the set teems with the sounds of water and wildlife, but also reflects the proliferation of industrial sounds and the slow dissolution of everything that made Fish Point so appealing in the first place.
After reading the liner notes, one might…
Yesterday we covered Cole Peters‘ soundscape of memory, as the artist revisited the many houses in which he once lived. Today we extend the topic in a more specific manner, as Marcelo Cugliari spends some time in his father’s room years after his death, capturing the sounds of radios and a radio/TV while revisiting memories and musing on the contrast between presence and absence.
Void…
