One quick caveat before I write about tonight's CD- after listening to it through three times, I had a read through the liner notes that adorn the rather lovely packaging, only to spot a thank you to myself that I had no idea was there. For the life of me I can't fathom what I did to deserve it either, but it was a nice thing to spot. I'm bloody glad I like the CD though.

The thank-you came from Paul Khimasia-Morgan, whose duo release this is alongside Simon Whetham. The disc is a recent-ish release on the Con-V label named The Grey Area, the title coming from the gallery in Brighton in which it the music was recorded. regular readers here will know a little about Whetham's music, as I seem to write about it quite often. Most often though his music is of the composed, sequenced field recording variety. Here, he utilises field recordings alongside a laptop and a shortwave radio, but his use of them is in a live, improvised context alongside Khimasia-Morgan's portable sampler, amplified surfaces, polystyrene, foam rubber, tuning forks etc, etc…

The general tone of this fifty-four minute long piece is quiet and understated, a really nice blend of Whetham's field recordings, which seem to stray away from what we might normally expect, and some very subtle, small sounds and soft textures from Khimasia-Morgan. There is a general sense of the wistful and esoteric here, a kind of emptiness that might soundtrack a film of a deserted town. Things begin with small rustling and clicking sounds every so often appearing over a thin hissing backdrop. The music evolves very slowly indeed, until about ten minutes in, as Khimasia-Morgan's input has become only slightly more active, Whetham's field recordings, strange, empty-sounding room spaces and maybe (only maybe) a shopping mall suddenly shift with the entry of a murkily mixed classical music piece, just for a minute or two, a beautiful work for strings merging into the mix. Whether this sound came from a pre-recorded sample, or whether Whetham got lucky with the radio is uncertain, but the arrival of this element into the music is quite beautiful.

Things drift away to near silence again, just slight shuffles and ultra quiet hums and burbles, but resurface every so often, perhaps with a sudden strike of a tuning fork from Khimasia-Morgan, or a grab of some alien sounding field recording from Whetham, but throughout, the feeling is of restraint and simplicity coupled with an achingly beautiful undercurrent evolving from the choices of sounds brought along to the performance. The music doesn't sound as polished or precise as Whetham's solo constructions, and despite the presumably predetermined decision to work in a quiet, textural realm it sounds like the tension of improvisation, the uncertainty of live collaboration is present, which gives the music a nice tension. Around the twenty-eight minute mark, as Khimasia-Morgan grinds what sounds like the polystyrene close to a microphone to produce maybe his loudest moment of the disc, Whetham, who had been letting a field recording of something uneventfully bleak build in volume suddenly cut off his sound, leaving Khimasia-Morgan's input completely exposed and out in the open, a lovely moment that shows the fragility of the music in its live form very nicely.

So things bubble and simmer away in similar style for the duration of the disc in a very pleasing, gentle manner. The sounds we hear keep changing, evolving dramatically enough and off-setting one another to keep the music engaging throughout. Its not just a matter of tasteful choices of sound either, as often little moments sound at odds with what we have already heard, challenging any status quo that might have formed in the music, shifting things on before they get stale. The music sounds pleasingly fresh, not really much like anything else in this vein I have heard for a good while, happy to take risks and yet also maintain the overall sensation of tentative balance and calm. I enjoyed this one a lot, a nice release by two of the UK's unsung and yet interesting and talented musicians. Take a listen if you can, there are only fifty copies... Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear

Another draining day today that ended with another headache, this one induced by not really drinking enough while working. Its just about passed by now, but as I am up early in the morning for work yet again I will try and keep today's review to a minimum. I have been listening tonight to a CD I have played a few times over the past couple of weeks, another release from the very prolific English field recordings manipulator Simon Whetham. Simon's work has fallen through my letterbox quite a few times over the past year, and while on occasions I might have criticised it for it has sounding too much as one might expect it to sound, it has always been music that has been constructed with great care, attention to detail and a strong sense of focus on an overall composition. The release I have been listening to this evening is a new disc on the White_Line Editions label entitled Greyscale: Restricted Access. The first part of the title indicates that this piece is the first in a subseries on the label entitled Greyscale, the second part a reference to the places in which Whetham recorded the sounds here- three disused industrial buildings in Eastern Europe, the kind of places that are usually hard to access here in the UK. The sounds are sourced from an old disused factory in Tallinn, Estonia, a decommissioned power station in Riga, Latvia and an old military station on the Russian border.

Even without hearing the music this list of recording sites provides us with a mental image of how these places might have been, how this music might sound. They conjure up images of stillness, a dusty, haunting quiet, but with every sound amplified by the large echoing spaces. Whetham's music, which is folded together here into a single, one hour long piece captures this atmosphere perfectly, at least for most of the album. From the opening, the music is quiet. Not so much silent, (there are in fact no silences at all) but just very low volume. The dynamic of the recordings is also deliberately flat and very slow, so the music, as it gradually appears at the beginning is made up of hollow, humming roomtones, naturally amplified tiny sounds as things fall over or blow on gusts of wind, sounds of traffic or trains seeping in from outside, wire fencing (I think), empty pipes, the list goes on. Everything is kept very restrained, subdued in terms of volume, but somehow full of a strange uncomfortable feeling, perhaps like we might actually feel if we were left to wander around such a place as a disused, deserted power station in a country we do not know.

Some field recordings material of this kind cries out for very close attentive listening and begs to have each and every sound spotted and identified. Restricted Access isn't one of these. The combined effect of the recordings used creates an overall sense of mood that doesn't really ask you to listen for the cracks between different recordings, doesn't shout about the cleverness of each individual sound, but rather takes everything and uses it to generate a fundamentally emotional state, a feeling of unease through a sense of pregnant stillness.

So for much of the album there is little variance, just this constant under the radar stream of collaged recordings that coalesce into this vague sense of mood. While very nicely done, with remarkable consistency, this bleak, grey soundscape might have become a little tedious over an entire hour. As it happens though, at around the forty minute mark the details gradually drop out of the recordings and a slowly oscillating tone rises up, initially just finding a place in front of the other sounds, but then gradually smothering everything and rising to a very high volume, shaking me as a listener from my relaxed sense of comfort and making me (on the first listen at least) turn the volume down before the wine glass on my desk shattered. This tone hangs on the air for a good five minutes or so more before giving away to a further ten minutes of near silent rustles and shuffles. At first, after the throbbing warmth of the tone it is hard to bring your ears to bear on these new small sounds, but after a while the drama of the last few minutes is forgotten and we follow these quiet sounds as they become gradually less audible, and the last minute of the recording features nothing at all.

Simon Whetham has rapidly become a name to keep an eye on in this area of collage/composition. Restricted Access has a feeling of confidence and clarity to its structure that suggests a maturity in approach, something much more than just recording nice sounds and piling them all together. If visiting the recording sites left a mark on Whetham then he has sought to (very successfully) portray this through the music, but not in a straight, uninteresting documentary manner, rather creating a piece of work that has a shape and life of its own. Very nice work indeed, definitely one for fans of this area.

At the Install Sound website, the label that released the CD I have been listening to this evening, there is a paragraph about the music that describes some of the sounds used as (paraphrasing) “benign- the kind of sounds you only notice when you are alone” I thought this was a beautiful notion, and being someone very interested in the way different people listen to different sounds it really hit a chord. There are indeed sounds that I hear when alone, maybe in the dark, maybe when walking by myself, sounds that if I was asked to describe them, or even figure out where they came from I might struggle, but they are there, making up the constant soundtrack to life, colouring in the silences.
it is these sounds that the duo of Simon Whetham and mise_en_scene attempt to mould into the thirty-seven minute long piece composition that forms their CD Eineandereweltstrasse . In the summer of 2008 Whetham went to Berlin, and made a series of field recordings, many late in the evening in the city. He and his collaborator later sculpted the recordings into the music presented on the CD.
I suspect that I have reviewed more CDs by the highly prolific Whetham than anyone else in these pages now, such is his considerable output, but I am less familiar with mise_en_scene, an artist who I do not know the real identity of, and as google wasn't a lot of help, (there seems to be several musicians using this moniker) and because (s)he is clearly happy to be known by the pseudonym alone then I am not going to spend any more time searching. Not knowing much more than this about one of the musicians here I am guessing when I say that I suspect the music here to be a long distance collaboration, but it does feel that way. From many aspects the CD is predictable and follows a lot of the same patterns you might expect from this currently very fertile end of the experimental music world. There are the sudden shifts in dynamic, quick cuts from noisy sections to quiet, slow, grainy textural parts moving at a glance into slamming noisy intervals, combinations of slowly fading sections and short sliced up edits. These methods are familiar tools in the musique concrete composer's box of tricks, and so from one point of view there is little new in this composition.
What does work very well indeed for me though is the feeling of uncertain familiarity in the sounds used, indeed that sense of knowing sounds somehow, but finding it hard to describe them. Although I have never lived in a city I, like most of us spend a lot of time in and around them, and there are certain aural sensations, a kind of constant hum, a grey background we come to know, although its not always obvious what the elements are that make up this feature. Then there are the more obvious sounds, trains pulling out of platforms, church bells reflecting around a busy built up area, cars rushing over rainy streets late at night, all sounds that will immediately represent city life to us all. It is a combination of these sounds that appear on Eineandereweltstrasse and so, for me at least, it is the strange sense of warmth and comfort that is encapsulated in these sounds that makes this a really nice CD to listen to. There is one moment around half way in, when after a loud, busy period of quick edits and abrupt noises everything falls away to virtual silence, but once your ears have attuned to the sudden drop into the space below it is clear that the city is still there, that greyness, the thin gauze of sound drifting over the place that doesn't belong anywhere else. This is a magical little moment for me, a kind of painting with memory and place.
If this sounds a little melodramatic then yes it probably is, but then some music has this kind of impact, a direct link to our memories of certain places at certain times. The composition found on Eineandereweltstrasse is good, a perfectly fine construction, but it is the strings that the actual sounds pull in my head that really make the music for me. For others, perhaps those that live in cities and cannot wait to get away from them, the sounds here may have a very different impact, but as I hear them they bring up images of walking back to hotels or railway stations late at night, usually after spending time in good company or with good music, and so these links make the sounds on Eineandereweltstrasse enjoyable to me.
Beautiful, fitting sleeve image as well.
Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear

So after one week in my new role I feel less tired and stressed, but worryingly slightly bored. I'm sure it won't last and I am enjoying the break from hard work while I can, but its nice to come home from work at a more sensible hour and be able to write about music without the haze of exhaustion affecting my judgement. This evening I have been listening to another 3? disc, except this one isn't actually a 3?, but eighteen minutes of music recorded onto a 5? CDr. If this sounds a strange thing to do then maybe you haven't ever purchased a lot of 3? CDrs- they are in fact more expensive than their full size relations…
Anyway, the disc in question is named Undercurrent and is a live recording made by Simon Whetham in Brighton just over a year ago, and released here on Paul Khimasia Morgan's Slightly Off Kilter label. Regular readers here will have read my writing about Simon Whetham's music before, He is a relatively prolific composer who creates vaguely concrete-ish collages of field recordings, invariably using a computer to edit and arrange pieces he has captured on his travels. As far as I am aware though, all of the releases I have listened to before have been studio pieces that Whetham has composed and arranged on a computer at home. This release is a recording of a live set. The question I then find myself wondering then is how much of this music was improvised in the moment, and how much prepared in advance.
If the sleeve note shad not given it away, I would not have known that this was a live recording. The sound is crystal clear, presumably taken either from the PA feed or directly out of Whetham's laptop, and so there is no room noise, no applause, nothing to suggest the music was performed live. Perhaps more importantly though the sounds are arranged in a manner we would normally expect from a studio work. Although the opening few minutes feature two or three separate tracks simply crossfaded over each other; one of birdcalls, another of crickets in the grass, another of a gently fizzing hiss of some kind, maybe some water sounds, after five minutes or so the first dramatic jump in the sound appears, with some of the densely layered sounds suddenly cutting out to be replaced by a new series of recordings. Crossfading between extended samples is easy to achieve live, but working with sudden cuts and immediate changes in material is less simple, which suggests to me that either Whetham prepared a set of sounds in advance he could easily flick between, or this is very deftly formed work indeed.
As a piece of music presented on a CD Undercurrent is good, if perhaps somewhat generic work. Assuming that all of the recordings were originally collected by Whetham (and I suspect this is certainly the case) then the real skill in this music comes in the capture of the sounds in the first place, as this has been done very well, with a wide variety of mostly natural sounds recorded with a crisp clarity throughout. The collage of sounds is perhaps no more than we might expect from this area of composition, gentle blends of sounds coupled with sudden jumpcuts, layers of material building slowly and intensifying until suddenly shifting to something else. The music is well executed, and there is much to say for the brevity of the performance, not allowing the sounds to outstay their welcome, but at the same time there is little I can write about this music that I have not already said about a number of other releases over recent months. What does set it slightly apart then is the live element, and the natural question I ask is how much was put together in advance of the show, and how much improvised in the moment? The answer of course lies only with Simon, particularly as close listening to the CD gives little away, and perhaps the answer doesn't actually matter, but I'm certainly intrigued anyway. Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear

This has a very cinematic feel, though Whetham gives equal time to (what sound like) natural phenomena, often having a roaring aspect, and human activity, including snatches of conversation, footfalls and various engines. Much of it is quiet, barely there rustling and, as such, is very pleasant to listen to. Fractures works very nicely and is well worth hearing by fans of the territory.
Brian Olewnick, Just outside

The album is pieced together from dozens and dozens of fragments of field recordings made by Whetham on a trip to Iceland in 2007 where he took part in an axhibition alongside visual artists Kathryn Thomas and Tamany Baker. The title of the album apparently alludes to both the broken up glaciers of Iceland's coasts and various tensions that occurred between the artists during their visit. The title could also easily represent the nature of the music, which involves sounds taken from all over the place, both natural and man-made sounds used throughout.

This kind of music, a kind of sculpted work made from field recordings, seems to be increasingly common these days. It feels slower than musique concrete, with longer samples of sounds used than that genre is more commonly associated with. Perhaps as portable digital recording has become easier and cheaper in recent years, and as just about everyone has software capable of simple sound collage on their computers these days anyone can make this type of music without too much effort or skill. So as there are more and more CDs of this kind available, so we need a little more originality and creativity from the musicians to stand out above the crowd. The subject matter of the field recordings will often be very similar on these releases as well, with running water, hydrophone recordings, traffic sounds and crowd scenes all very common indeed. As Whetham uses recordings he made out on and around glaciers alongside the sounds of Iceland's capital city, most of the aforementioned list of sounds appear throughout Fractures . Water sounds in particular feature heavily.

So is the album any good or just another release along predictable lines? Well it is predictable to some degree in that it uses many of the sounds we might expect, but there are other elements in there that turn the ear, and the overall composition of the sounds is really rather good, with real attention paid to the way sounds fit together. The fifth track here, an untitled eleven minute long piece made up entirely (I think) of running water sounds is something that sounds entirely predictable, but actually is done really well. The two loud recordings of running water that cross over each other near the start of the track work really well together, creating a dense field of detail that actually leads you to forget what you are listening to. Sudden cuts away to other, much quieter trickling sounds etc are also very well done, a sense of strong timing and suspense present throughout. When traffic sounds appear in one of the early tracks we also get the loud, hollow roar of vehicles in a tunnel and the instantly recognisable but also oddly musical sound of a loose fan belt on one of the passing cars. On these tracks, while the subject matter might tick many of the usual boxes the way the sounds are used is particularly good. it feels like a lot of time and work went into the decisions made about where to place sounds in these pieces.

Elsewhere there are less obvious sounds present. There is a lovely, subtle period in the seventh track where an unidentifiable dull roar is undercut by a murky, unclear recording of a man talking, an odd electronic pulse appears in the second piece that could be some kind of pedestrian crossing warning (but probably isn't) and spread out through the album there are often sudden appearances of sounds that at first do not seem to fit in, but when viewed through a wider lens actually represent Iceland as much as the watery sounds might. There are a few dull moments, a long period of gurgling water that takes up much of the seventh piece following the disappearance of the man's voice has a nondescript feel to it, but then here I wonder if we are just being lured into a false sense of relxation as after about five minutes a blast of layered water sounds at very high volume suddenly knocks you sideways (actually causing me to spill toffee mousse into my lap on the first listen through, and still making me jump on the second, even though I knew it was coming. The use of sudden shifts in volume, as well as dramatic cuts in subject matter throughout the disc is very well done indeed. The final track on the album is particularly interesting. Lasting some nine minutes in total, the track begins with a solid five minutes of complete silence, only for water sounds to crash in with serious intensity all of a sudden, and then shift and cut in and out in a violent manner through to the end of the disc.

All in all Fractures is pretty good, a well put together, carefully considered construction that didn't lose my interest after several listens through. Certainly one for the field recording fans, but also a good recommendation if you like a bit of modern concrete. Hopefully the other two or three discs by Whetham waiting for me here will match up.

D/R

Tonight I listened to a further CD by Bristol based sound artist Simon Whetham, and a disc named D/R on the 1000fussler label in particular. The liner notes to this disc include the following description of the circumstances around the recording of this music:

"October 2008, I join a group of UK based performance artists in Tallinn, Estonia, to produce new collaborative works as guests of Non Grata. The project, Co-LAB‘08, is organised and run by Orion Maxted and protopPLAY. The theme of the project is ‚Deconstruction/Reconstruction‘, appropriate as this reflects my composing using field recordings.
The first performances are solo, showcasing existing work. I spend two days recording and composing in Tallinn, performing a 30 minute sound piece for the group.
The second performance has barely begun when the power is cut and a hole is smashed in the wall of the performance space with a sledgehammer.
The third performance is a group reaction to this, starting loud and intense, gradually becoming calm and peaceful.
Throughout the fourth performance, individuals reacted to artists actions during the previous performance. My subject, Yoko Ishiguro, carried out the following: smoking, cooking, washing her hair, eating a banana, attempting all simultaneously."

Interesting, if not all that clear stuff. How any of this translates itself into the music we hear on the disc is equally uncertain, but it seems as if we get the first, third and fourth performances mentioned in the text on the CD. The second was presumably just too short to be worth recording and presenting, and once the power was cut there was no way of recording what happened. (But who cut the power before wreaking havoc on the walls anyway? Was this planned? Part of an artwork? or just someone that didn't appreciate the music?
The first piece, just named Talinn, lasts near enough half an hour, and consists of a series of passages of grainy textures, sometimes looping obviously, often not, that generally tend to rise slightly in volume over a twenty second or so duration, sometimes evolving slowly into something else, sometimes cutting dead, or replaced by something louder suddenly arriving. Although many of the sounds are not that unusual in the kind of music I listen to (vaguely industrial hums, gritty friction, rattling surfaces etc) their placement within this curious structure is interesting. There is no tendency towards a big conglomeration of sounds, no clever juxtaposition of different sounds, just this strangely patient, oddly shaped half hour of sounds that were collected from around the Talinn area.
The second track is something quite different again though, and much more interesting again. The twelve and a half minute piece begins very loudly indeed, with a cacophony of what sounds like multiple layered snippets of dramatic symphonic music, all piled on top of each other thick and fast to create a mass of vaguely familiar yet completely indecipherable sound. This continues for several minutes, only to gradually decrease in volume half the way through the tracks duration, a few distant bangs and scratches slowly dissolving into a very very quiet series of hums and whispers for the final closing minutes. The complete contrast between the riotous grandeur of the track's opening and the virtual disappearance of all sound later in the piece is really quite jarring. I found myself checking the CD player to be sure an extra track had not clicked over. The track, not surprisingly titled Decrescendo is a really curious one, that I actually replayed several times midway through my first listen through the album, something I don't often do.
The seven minute long final track is called Yoko, and presumably is the piece formed from recordings of Yoko Ishiguro's actions as outlined in the liner text. We hear dribbling water, presumably from the washing of hair, a ticking clock, distant crashes of metal, deep claustrophobic breaths (which don't sound female, sorry if they are!) clicking, hissing, and again everything gradually disappears into virtually nothing. This piece does not sound much like music as such, more a collection of incidental sounds, a bit like when someone phones you from a mobile phone without meaning to, and you hear the inside of their pocket for a while. The the sounds are all quite clearly recorded though, the piece is certainly no accident, and there is enough dynamic arrangement to be sure that it is a composed piece.
These last two tracks are easily the best I have heard yet from Simon Whetham. They are both quite original and unusual, very different to what I have heard from him before. D/R confuses me as much as it intrigues and delights in places, and that is a good thing. Musique Concrete always works better for me when I am surprised by sounds and structures, when I find myself wondering what on earth I am listening to and how it all fits together. Nice stuff. I wonder if I put a sledgehammer through the wall between tracks one and two would it become even more authentic?!
Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear

Lightyears is a half hour long piece of music produced as a mixdown from a a 7.1 surround sound installation that Whetham created as part of an exhibition of work by the artist Kathryn Thomas. Essentially, the exhibition, named Darkspace showcased paintings by Thomas, and the sound installation used elements taken from music Thomas had found inspirational over her twenty years as an artist along with the sound of Thomas actually painting in her studio.

The thing is, I don't know Thomas or her painting, other than the image that adorns Lightyears' packaging so this CD ends up being a recording that somehow paints a picture of an essentially unknown personality using sound. To this end, the music on Lightyears is different in its aims and often its form to Fractures, though there is still a lengthy recording of waves crashing on a shore at the heart of quite a bit of the album. The sound of water is certainly a central theme for Whetham. Much of the CD uses short, obvious loops taken from other CDs though. I cannot quite identify which albums any of the sounds come from, but there is a definite sense of mid-eighties ambient music here. Perhaps the recordings of astronauts borrowed from NASA archives that open the album colour my perception to some degree, but Brian Eno's music frequently occurs to me, the Apollo recordings in particular. There is also a looping clip of meandering piano (maybe Satie?) along with clips of the BBC shipping forecast, orchestral strings, tiny fragments of drum ‘n bass and other more abstract material including recordings of the Northern Lights (I'm not sure how that works). These are all then layered over and around these slowly changing sampled loops. It all drifts along slowly in a somewhat inoffensive manner.

I have to say that while this release is very different to Fractures , and so probably should not be compared to that release at all, it is nowhere near as interesting to these ears. What made Fractures work for me was the sheer volume of interesting sounds collaged together into an intricate structure. While maybe I criticised the use of increasingly clichéd sounds found on so many recent field recording / sound arrangement CDs of late they were used very well indeed. Lightyears sounds very different. to begin with, the piece was created first and foremost as a gallery installation rather than a CD, and so the sense of careful CD composition that was evident in Fractures is missing here. I'm not sure if this music sounded quite the same in the gallery or not, but it feels more expansive, as if being condensed to an audio file on a single disc has tethered some of its impact. The music itself though, with all of its dreamy loops of Enoesque floatiness is actually quite tiresome in places. The problem is, the music is designed to capture the musical character and work of Kathryn Thomas, so maybe it does that perfectly, and Lightyears is absolutely the perfect accompaniment to her paintings, but as I have nothing other than the CD to refer to this side of the composition is lost to me. What I am left with then is a watery spiral of sounds inspired by music that I don't think I like very much. The best part of the album for me comes late in the piece where the crashing of waves blends with some kind of squelchy crackling sound for a good while, but even here this passage is overlaid with slow meandering synths looped slowly over and over. It is well made once again, but there just doesn't seem to be enough tension or energy in the music for my particular taste, and music based around looping sounds is probably always going to have to work hard to impress me. Not really my cup of tea then, but actually quite different to Fractures, which is nice to see, and actually makes me more curious to listen to the other couple of Whetham discs I have here now as well.

Whetham puts together the various pieces of his jigsaw in such a way that everything fits together, but the final image is quite startling. Throughout the piece although all of the sounds are easily recognisable they are layered, juxtaposed and cut short in such a way that the music portrays a sense of drama and excitement throughout. So the album does not start with the sound of a light airplane flying overhead on a summers day, it starts with two overlaid recordings of airplanes with engines roaring at different pitches. The mass of tiny sounds captured in the forest are looped and multitracked so that they build their own hypnotic intensity before being cut short as the music falls into its next phase of sounds.
Throughout Understory there is a sense of the composer really understanding the qualities of the sounds he is using. Completely disparate recordings are put together because it appears they each contain sounds of similar pitches, detailed masses of tiny sounds are sprinkled over longer looming noises, tiny details within individual recordings are used to compositional effect. This album is less about presenting beautifully accurate representations of the world around us, rather it is about the shape and form of the composition itself. Its as if the starting point of the sounds used does not matter, and it is merely taken as material to be folded and moulded into the music we hear.
Overall I rather like Understory . Obviously its up to each individual to decide if they are willing to pay for the download, but that matters not for the sake of this review. This is one field recordings release I could easily see myself listening to repeatedly. Simon also tells me he has a number of potential CD releases due on the horizon as well. I look forward to hearing those too.
Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear

Landlocked

Unlike Simon Whetham I've never been to Mongolia but I believe him when he says that this massive country hasn't got much water. Wetham got struck by this and, oddly enough, all the recordings he made in Mongolia, only the water recordings survived. With these he recorded a pure soundscape piece of water flowing and various types of rain (or so it seems) and created a very nice, if not a bit short at twenty-three minutes, piece out of it. Silence, near silence and massive water sounds are mixed together into a soundpicture of a dry country. Quite nice at that, this Lopez like work. Frans de Waard, VITAL WEEKLY

ascension_suspension

On the more conventional format we find a likewise unknown British composer and sculptor Simon Whetham. He has had a release before on the online Filament label, even when he has been creating music for twenty years. During a trip in to the Portes du Soleil region in France he made the source recordings for this release, more in particular cable cars. Apparently minimally processed, which I find hard to believe. I have travelled up in the mountains, always taking a cable car, lazy soab that I am, but also because of the sound involved. The mechanics that are there for quite some time making the rusty sounds and on a good day with some fresh wind, this is a nice way to spend your time. So for me common territory, more or less (I wasn't in the same area as Simon), and I must say I heard his work with some fascination. He cleverly repeats lengthy blocks of sounds, thus creating the illusion of a trip, with occasional bumps along the ride. Field recordings with just a little bit of procession, but with a high amount of imagination. One wants to go on holiday straight away!
Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly

During a trip to the Portes du Soleil region of France, Bristol-based field composer Simon Whetham recorded the sounds emitted by cable cars, lulling sounds and rhythms that go largely unnoticed by passengers making the slow ascent to the alpine mountains' upper reaches. To his credit, Whetham lets the 28-minute recording unfold slowly and consequently the listener, aided by an evocative stream of tiny rumbles and chain-like rattles produced by the conveyor and cogs, is easily able to visualize the car's ascent. A vaguely unsettling ambiance creeps in as one imagines the passengers isolated within the tiny enclosure and suspended precariously high over the chasm while freezing winds swirl outside and cowbells clank far below. Though minimal processing was applied to this headphones-styled release, Whetham unobtrusively layers sounds in order to maximize tension and release. textura