Sindre Bjerga — Ghost In The Machine
Bjerga’s piece is a twelve minute long collage, made up of reasonably long sections; its not a musique concrete style series of events, more a series of small situations. The recordings are quite raw, presumably using an ambient microphone - or possibly a simple boombox; and the resulting sounds suffer a little from being uniformly murky and “mid-ish” in terms of frequencies. These sounds range from hovering feedback with creeping high pitch tones, to radio/CB voices; from woody loops that sound like a grandfather clock slowing and dying, to speeding and slurring piano lines - with a predominance of underwater murkiness and drone. As I said, most of these sections are fairly long in length, but there are also quicker, shorter edits; however, these are rarely used “aggressively” or with antagonism. To be fair, there is neither real continuity or jolting contrast across the joined sections; its a rather odd track - though one with a few moments of great sounds.
So, to the remixes… Three of the mixes are approximately the same length as Bjerga’s piece, the remaining two trail in at about one minute and five minutes respectively. Of these two, the shorter is by Koff Koff, and condenses the original into a bubbling, bit-crushed stutter that sounds a bit like the journeys of a toy train. The slightly longer mix, by Pål Asle Pettersen, is essentially a nice, haunting, slurred drone; albeit one with very jarring, noisy interruptions. It has a genuine warmth, whilst retaining gently grating noise textures. The first of the longer mixes, and the first to be heard, is by Wbaum; it announces itself with glitching noises, and thus sets out its stall, and tools, for the rest of the track. Wbaum creates a nice sound environment, with its full range of frequencies particularly noticeable since it follows bjerga’s initial track. The main devices here are looping, pitch-shifting and judicious use of reverb and sub-bass. It is a rather “digital” environment, but its also one with a real sense of space and dynamics over the duration; ending with wonderful restraint. Sad Servant Doom has the fourth mix on the cd, and also the most curious. It appears to essentially be the original track with other elements laid over it, or perhaps remixed “live” - its very unclear. Its not terribly engaging, though this might just be fatigue on my part: since none of the remixers deviate massively from Bjerga’s original sound, the ears soon tire. The last track on the cdr is Iversen’s remix; this loops and layers recognisable chunks of “Ghost In The Machine” into quite a hypnotic, reverberating drone. It maintains a consistent tone and slow intensity over its twelve minute duration, without ever standing still.
If the tracks on this cdr were scattered apart onto different albums, they would all command more attention from the ear. As it is, laid side by side, they somewhat smother and restrain each other. They all stay really quite faithful to Bjerga’s original sounds, and suffer for this reason; no-one has really torn the source material apart, and taken it somewhere else. This isn’t to say the tracks are all bad - certainly the mixes by Wbaum, Pål Asle Pettersen and Iversen are very listenable - but its a shame no-one was more destructive, creative or adventurous with Bjerga’s track. Its something that the individual remixes, and thus the release as a whole, would have benefitted from