Tattered Kaylor — Selected Realities
'V O L U M E', the opening track of the CD, exploits the reliably reverent sonorities of Tibetan singling bowls. Smoothly looped and mixed, the lightly pulsing artefacts that build with the introduction of each new layer produce a naturally glistening breeze in sound. Much more interesting, though, is the extended version at the end of the CD, that is a stereo mixdown of a multichannel installation where individual tones were allocated their own speaker, each placed on one of six different levels of a stairwell. Submerged within this vertical, man-made environment, the bowls become more climactic: the gaps between them are more spread out to reveal the resonant trails imposed by the space, while their apex in volume adds an additional soaring chime. This three-dimensional weave has an extraordinary, dreamy presence that makes the earlier, shorter version seem redundant.
The second piece, 'Drainbirds', is also afforded two versions on 'Selected Realities'. On the CD we get the original stereo mix that the brief sleevenotes reveal was only conceived for playback and recording in an underground drainway beneath a suburban tramline. So while the original version is an ultra clean set of varied bird calls and flutters that travel across the stereo image, the live in situ recording presented on the DVD is a bit more interesting. The drainway provides the lush backdrop of constantly flowing water, and thickens the often shrill tweets to form an odd image of underground-dwelling birds.
For the start of the DVD, however, we're back in the stairwell, where Elieff's experimenting with the environment in the same way a child likes to shout in a subway, as she 'la, la's along to bass tones and percussive clatters produced by Lennart Katzwinkel, enjoying the return of their tones.
Much more considered, though, is the final piece on the DVD, 'Samadhi Mechanism', an audio-visual representation of the underside of the automated seating in a 5500 pax theatre, with added noises from other machines, such as a printer and an elevator, and more resonant fare from the theatre's basement and beneath a trainline bridge. For much of the film the space beneath the theatre's auditorium is ghostly still, apart from the odd twitch of a shadow, giving a post-apocalyptic, Logan's Run-type vibe. The sound, however, has musical qualities as regularly chiming, processed tones, solemnly sing out amidst the otherwise spare clatter of hidden movements. But the best passages in this kinda industrial (underground) chamber music is when the machines come to life and we see the beautifully-shot spinning armatures revolve so fast their appearance becomes static as their rumble takes over the tune.
Tattered Kaylor's 'Selected Realities' showcases interesting experiments in the confluence of found sounds and their deliberate placement in man-made spaces. Even without a 5.1 surround-sound playback device ideally required of the DVD, Elieff's focussed, if uneven, probing reveals several otherwise-secret sonic properties to savour.