Brian House has put together something of an album, the contents of which really pass over anything resembling the possibility of a critical appraisal (more on this in a sec). The concept of Infrasound –– the auditory information that exists below the threshold of human perception – is a topic closely wed to larger concerns of situatedenss, environmental awareness, and the like. So when Brian House, a professor of such things, set out to construct microphones capable of capturing such phenomena, the die was essentially cast. In other words, House, fully cognizant of this fact, had no real control over what it is said microphones would relay. In order to render these findings perceptible, House used an old chestnut of tape recording: speed things up, which will de facto pitch things up to a frequency range that our little lugs can hold onto.
Now the point about being beyond the purview of any critical apparatus (I've been called worse) should begin to come into focus. How is one to make a judgment around the breeze in a forest, or the sound of waves crashing? "Ah, nice enough, but I prefer the way air moves through a more dense arrangement of trees." I am walking through the open door, I realize, but it is all to say that what is left to talk about here is House's concept, and perhaps its implementation. Split into two, 12-minute tracks, each comprised of a sped-up segment of 12 hours, where each minute is roughly equivalent to 1 hour of the day in question. Much to my surprise, without knowing it, the nighttime portion sounded much more night-y than the former, though pitch shifting will do funny things to your perception. It made me wonder why speed and pitch still had to be married to one another, given so much in the world of electronic composition that has worked to separate them? Finally, given the hallucinatory nature of these phenomena, why not keep going with their manipulation into the realm of the audible? There is not much truth to material anyway, but I digress.
Fans of field recordings, passive microphonics, and other niche listening experiences, will certainly find a bizarre, if familiar world of acoustic phenomena on Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World.
