BJNilsen — Massif Trophies
The LP collects five recordings, the names of which reflect different facets of the artist's experience of the mountain environment. The opener Alpe Djouan begins with a more or less straight recording of an approaching thunderstorm with the voices of local cattle herders (and their charges) helping to build a sense of tension at the approaching deluge. When it arrives Nilsen deploys some of his electronic effects and treatments to turn the storm into a strange wash of acousmatic sound and manipulated atmospheres. When the storm passes we remain with the cattle on the freshly drenched mountain side on the second track Rough Grazing , which is composed almost entirely out of layered recordings of cow bells. It's quite a surreal sound, as if the cows had been transformed into shamanic musicians sending praise to the heavens for the passing of the storm. The short La Descente completes side A of the LP. From out of a deep drone suggestive of more atmospheric disturbances over the horizon we hear what is clearly the sound of the artist rapidly descending the mountain with all the attendant glitches, thumps and scrapes picked up by his microphone. Nilsen here captures in the most material sense the physical challenge presented by the environment.
More darkly glowing drones open side B on Eaux Rousses which departs significantly from the preceding side's naturalism. There is little familiar here to grasp on to. The cicadas are silent and not a bird can be heard. This is the mountain as isolation, as retreat and reflection. It's also, as the albums notes hint, an evocation of the sacred; the mountain as ritual site and closest point to the heavens. Is that an avalanche or a giant moving through the valley? Distant thunder (also a theme for Harold Budd, another adept of environmental mysticism) rolls forth carrying stretched and twisted winds, strangely metallic sounds. This is a landscape rendered foreboding and occluded; a place between worlds. Just as the tension peaks we reappear from the fug of drones into the final piece Camping Europa which begins innocuously enough with compulsory distant moped, church bells and cicadas of the Italian countryside before everything begins to distort and smudge together into a fever dream of addled sonic manipulations. Rain drops falling like gravel onto a tin roof, spectral tones rise beyond rumbling sub-bass and rustlings. Once again the artist has conjured a disquieting environment, displacing our expectations of what a bucolic mountain walk should be like. Half heard voices are carried on the wind, machinery is rendered unrecognisable. If this is Nilsen's exposition of his experience in one of Gran Paradiso's campsites then he has my sympathy. It doesn't sound like a place I would wish to spend the night!
Massif Trophies is a solid piece of work from an experienced and always interesting sound artist. If I have one criticism it's that his compositions sometimes move into territory where the original field recordings are entirely lost. When this happens, as it does on all his records at some point he tends to fall into quite predictable dark ambient tropes that do little to emphasise the quality of the original material. There seems to be something in the water at the moment with sound artists, as this record comes in the wake of Angus Carlyle's In the Shadow of the Silent Mountain which took as it's object mountains in Southern Italy. In any case BJNilsen has added his characteristic take on this sound-world with his usual quality and technical touches.