Column One — Cindy, Loraine & Hank
Several tracks could be described as the sounds of kicking around junk in a warehouse. This is not a bad thing, as the cold, reverberant concrete brings with it a very specific ambience. My friends and I once made a recording inside an abandoned military bunker, capturing the sounds of pieces of decayed metal as hit by sticks and limbs. Thick metal doors kicked, rusty old hinges groaning, resounding footsteps. The 4th track of the first disk here sounds much the same as what we came up with.
The pacing of the music is slow and deliberate, theatric in its diverse unfolding of gestures. Long periods of uneasy calm are broken by thunderous motor noise. Abstractions are encapsulated and humanized by the whispers which signal the endings of stanzas. Rarely returning to any place previously seen, each piece brings an entirely new palette of sound sources.
I was quite surprised to hear the sounds of trumpet, piano and drumset introduced more than halfway through the album. Later on in this track, "Cherokee", we listen to the bending of wood, a reed splitting, and then are cast off into a howling lonely wind for "Not", the end of the first disk. It is cavernous and not unlike Lustmord's "Heresy"."Antiphona #2" brings new realms of clever electroacoustic ambiguity. Such deep, fascinating textures of unknown origin. Here, we modulate between flavors of noise with the radio dial. There are brief of moments of sped up chipmunk radio broadcast, brightly cold gongs and chimes, helicopter whirr. Later, we are dunked in the water.
This album requires some patience, but is a wondrous mental journey, with a deep and rich selection of ever-changing textures. With textures sourced from metal and desolate industrial locations as well as close mic'd studio improvisations, it evokes a haunted yet soothing air of solitude. It's some of the listenable and inventive music I've ever heard from the musique concrete idiom, and recalls many of my favorite moments of Thighpaulsandra or 80's Nurse With Wound. Its 2 disk length is well justified, and is quite worth repeated examining and deciphering.