Maciej Wirmański — A Hole In A Wall

A Hole In The Wall is a two-track affair, which takes in fairly static/ stayed field recordings made from inside a buried pipe/ water tank.  Each track runs around the twenty-minute mark, with this being a self-released digital release.

Maciej Wirmański is Field recordist, sound designer, noise maker from Bustryk, Poland- he also runs the label Szara Reneta. He’s seemingly been sonically active since 2017.  Apparently, the recordings that make up this release were captured when he was attending the Sanatorium of Sound Festival in Sokołowsko. He was hiked a lot during this time, and one day came across the ruins of old buildings. These ruins were based on a slope of a hill in between a meadow and woods. When getting close to the ruins he noted the black eye of a rusty pipe- this travelled from outside to the inside of ruins. Putting his ear to the pipe and he heard a rumble, which was so loud close-up, but almost unnoticeable at a  short distance. He placed a  shotgun microphone into the pipe, and a pair of omni mics on the outside. Then made created these two tracks from the recordings- with minor post-production and no effects added.

So each track runs around the twenty-one-minute mark- first up we have “Movement I”- here we find a blend of constant pipe like rumble, this is surrounded by echoed slashes and reverberating drips. Together these create a bluntly muffled vibe, which sits between hollowed out post-industrial texturing, low-key/ barren drone making, and textured noise. The two elements remain fairly fixed/ constant, but we do of course get variation on the pipe rumbles and the revibrating water tones. 

“Movement II” seems to find the rumble slightly further away, with this time a waving billow been added to the blend reverbed dips, drops, and splashes. Once again the main tones of persistent and set. This second track is ok, I guess- but I felt there wasn’t enough difference from the first track, to really need another twenty minutes of similar sound again.

One of the key skills of a great sound recordist is capturing an interesting sound environment well, with the second key skill been knowing where/ when to cut it. As a release A Hole In The Wall certainly does the first, unfortunately, the second is less on display here- so in finishing I’d say I like what’s been captured here, and if maybe Wirmański had varied more how/ where he captured the field recordings for the second track. Then we would have had a more varied and rewardingly creative forty-minute release.