Loopool — Impressions Of The MCAS El Toro

Following spending the late nineties/early noughties as a bassist in punk rockers The Starvations, Jean-Paul Garnier has since been experimenting with the non-idiomatic use of sound “to take the listener on an experiential trip, not merely through the expectation fulfillment on which music has operated for so long, but into new territory all together,” as his website puts it.

One such new territory is the Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in California. Decommissioned in 1999, the vast site, originally designed to handle the largest of US military aircraft, is currently used as a filming location whilst it is developed into one of America’s largest metropolitan parks. Garnier’s involvement here is as part of The Legacy Project which seeks to use the site-in-development as a subject for a wide range of documentary and art works, which includes the world’s largest pinhole camera, and now this documentation of Garnier’s sound installation at the site.

The sleevenotes reveal why Garnier chose the location for this field recording project: "the lack of population, and the lack of man-made 'music' ... allows for the opportunity to 'trap' the sounds that the place itself is producing..." And on the evidence of the twenty minute collage that opens the disk, the place produces an array of interesting, if bleak, textures. Threaded with the lopsided rhythm of someone walking through one of the site's highly reverberant aircraft hangars, the piece is irregularly punctuated by the odd, menacingly loud hit with thunderous aftermath and the stubborn dripping of a water outlet. Together, the sparse sound-world Garnier leads us through suggests, appropriately enough, emptyness.

The main track is followed by a second, slightly shorter companion piece, labelled 'Chance Arrangement', where sounds from the first track are re-presented in a denser, busier collage that's more immediately engaging as a result. There seems to be much more movement here, with roaring, scraping and reverberating grey textures emerging over each other's tails like an industrial chain reaction. But still the stony reverb of mechanical manoeuvres promotes a scavenging quest in an unpopulated world.

Despite the carefully gathered and layered site-specific sounds, it is a shame that the release explicitly communicates what the sounds signify. This makes it difficult to hear the sounds as and off themselves, instead filling the mind with images of vast, empty structures and creating expectations in place of the allure of the unknown. And so the work remains a highly evocative image of a uniquely changing environment, conserving an experience of a barren, man-made land that would otherwise be forgotten in time.