Max Devereaux & Alec Watson — Febrile

It’s a bold and precarious thing to try and marshal sound into a viable relationship with events, things, etc., that are not, strictly speaking, about sound. Sound is so ephemeral that it can be easily bent to whatever agenda, as score or testimony, or something in between.

Our eyes (and ears) start to glaze over the second someone waxes all political about Cage‘s silence or Oliveros‘s deep listening, at least mine do. But what if the sounds in question were more emotive than evidentiary? This is the strength, as I understand it, of Febrile, a collaboration between Max Devereaux and Alec Watson that captures being in a conference room high above the city streets of Minneapolis while all hell was breaking loose. Over ten tracks, the duo, who were barely acquainted with one another before the project took shape, traded field recordings for FM synthesis, until a haunting tension was achieved that reflected the uncertainty and inwardness of that moment and that room.

There is what seems to be anxious tapping and arhythmic shuffling in the longest and weirdest track, “p7-2”, which puts most of the textures on display that are found elsewhere: almost nothing that would contribute to a reliable sketch of a cityscape. Instead, there is mostly mood, faceless and without distinguishing character, which puts the anonymity and remove of the conference room front and center. The tapping and faint traces of a world below create a claustrophobic sense of space throughout, as if the sounds, and not just the humans, have been interned.

Fans of field recordings and similarly ambitious projects will find Febrile an uneasy listen. Given the subject matter, that sounds about right.