Westen Grey — After Hours I

You are sitting in a room. It is not clear who is there with you, or what they brought with them today (the present case concerns the year 2006), but there you are. You know this because all of the sounds have been spatialized, to the point where they appear to emerge out of the black night of silence that engulfs them. Things are tapped on, rattled, agitated, and otherwise excited, much like the microphones (we imagine) that originally bore witness to this room and the corresponding sonic events. In fact, it is not so much you but said listening devices that are in this room, much in the way the film camera replaced the eyes of a detective in classic noir. It could be a soundtrack to some horror piece dedicated to blindness, but then the fact of things appearing closer and farther away would make little sense if it were. 

This rambling describes what it’s like to spend time with Western Grey’s After Hours I: a minimalist, durational epic divided into three movements. There Is a lot that doesn’t happen here, over the course of nearly an hour, where the grainy miasma of an emptied artist-run space served as the reverberant instrument for a 2006 session between Sean Baxter, David Brown, and Philip Samartzis. Whatever is happening, it is neither passive nor at peace. The entire work feels exploratory, both metaphorically and literally; as in, looking for one’s way in this space without clear guidance or direction. Why now, 20 years after the fact? Nothing has aged, at least sonically speaking, anyway. After Hours I is a kind of field recording/archival project, but one which haunts with acumen and precision in the present, precisely by knowing when exactly to let go.

Fans of these artists’ work should be interested in the historical character here, while others with a special affinity for real-time field recording and acoustic exploration will appreciate this haunted house of a record. For more