Rob Copper — Accepting The Machines

Rob  Copper is an Australian sound artist’s, painter and Sculptor. His sonic work is best described as quite barren and often windswept- he uses a  mixture of junk yard like drone ‘n’ pick matter along with percussive like elements, windy and barren field recordings, tape noise, sometimes clocks and other unusual mechanised or wind-up objects to create the creaking, bowing and often quite desolate feel of his sound works.

“Accepting The Machines” is his second full length album, and it features a full length CD of his audio works, plus  a business card cd that features a short biography and a selection of his textured, patterned and often one or two coloured canvas which bring to mind a more bright and vibrate take on Mark Rothko blocks of color like painting. The albums artwork also uses a few of his bright yellow & red color blockspaintings which really are the complete opposite of the clanking picking and windswept sounds we find inside. 

The album offers up eight tracks in all that fall between the a minute and a half mark and near twenty eight minutes mark a piece. And for me the longer tracks are the more rewarding here as Copper gets to build his quite distinctive sound world and lets them unfold in a slow, quite eerier, at times jarring and creative manner. Take the eleven minutes ‘Ajax Train Spoonbill’  that utilizes a stainless steel “taweny frog mouth instrument” which was recorded in a abounded bolt factory, the sound of two wind up gramophones and a stainless steel “spoonbill instrument”. The track starts out with barren wind creaking celling sounds then adds in the eerier metal flicking tone along with picked metal string like elements. Through the rest of the track these flicking and picking elements drift in 'n' out of the sound picture as eerier gramophone textures appear along with the sounds of the weather battering factory - it all feels an odd mixture of sound art, acoustic industrial texturing and hovering/ forking drone matter.

To be fair the album as a whole is a little mixed in quality- with some pieces really hit the right spot and making good and creative sonic sense with there mixture of errier-ness and subtle junk/ industrial texturing. But then other tracks sound just like some one messing about in an abounded and windswept factory with not much artistic merit or enjoyment for the listener. I guess that is the problem with this type of thing, there’s a very thin line between interesting sound construction and just a bunch of textures and sounds runing together.

So ultimately “Accepting The Machines” is somewhat of a mixed bag, when it’s good it’s boarding on greatness, when it’s bad you’ll be staring at the tracks time read-out wishing he’d move onto something more interesting textural instead of treading clanking, grating and eerier sonic water.