Martin Clarke — Rural Route No.3

“Rural Route No.3”  features bleak, strangely appealing and often jarringly edited field recordings taken from the Shetland Islands in winter 2006.  Martin Clarke is a sound artists and experimental film maker from London, and this 3inch cdr is his firth release.

On offer here is nineteen minutes and twenty three seconds of audio, which is split up into eight tracks that run between near on four minutes to just over a minute a piece. The tracks feature a mixture of: throbbing and grating metallic drags/ ragged string like shimmers, banging and knocking metal sheet dwells underfed by winter wind billowing, metallic droning and cold tone dwelling, and all manner of barren, bleak and semi industrial metal clanks, throbs and dwells, along with whistling and billowing wind textures.  What makes it all so rewarding above the genreal bleak tone is the way Clarke edits from track to track in often quite a jarring and jerking manner…you’ll be immersed in a clunking metallic dwell, the he’ll suddenly cut away to a billow wind dwell. And this jarring tendency makes you feel very on edge and twitching through-out the releases just under twenty minute running time.

So a fine, clanking and barren collection of field recordings that nice harness the feeling of bleak and cold winters, with the added edginess of quick edits from track to track- meaning you come away from this 3inch feeling melancholic yet very nervy