While working on her Vespertine album, Björk once provided the duo Matmos with a request for "the sound of pussy willows opening" (the florists petitioned took this for a hoax and that never made it on the record); I had a roommate who, after hearing his eyelashes brushing against a pillow case, frustratingly sought a way to capture what his skull could resonate — sadly, machines and physical space / materials would not comply. We're not talking about getting a proper level, avoiding hiss or any other capability of the wondrous invention called the microphone, but the replacement of "phone" with "scope" to snapshot tiny elements either sailing under the aural radar or overlooked by busy minds — and, somehow, block out the overwhelming racket that overshadows these curios.
A number of sound artists devoted / continue to devote their lives to exposing hidden potential in otherwise non-communicative, miniscule objects or circuits (i.e. Hugh Davies, Nicolas Collins, Jeph Jerman, the entire Bug Incision label, Jason Kahn, Toshimaru Nakamura, the duo of EKG etc.), and the efforts could surely be blamed on John Cage's 1960 work Cartridge Music. The premise is pretty straight-forward: remove the needle from a turntable cartridge, insert something else (feathers, toothpicks, crochet tools, nails, pipe cleaners) and move this across records, or cymbals, or braille magazines — or just touch it to your thumb; attaching contact microphones to furniture is also encouraged. Forging something more than thumps and the jarring experience of bumping into a record player at a party requires skill, but the performer's dexterity is further tested by Cage's score of sheets rife with irregular shapes, transparencies, circles to represent time and a goal of laying these out "in order to create a constellation from which one creates one's part". However, the neatest thing that came out of this was another layer of Cage's proclivity for indeterminacy (don't you dare call it improvisation — he hated that) where both the composition and the sonic world are more or less unanticipated and markedly chaotic.
For this version, septet Stephen Cornford, Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Robert Curgenven, Ferran Fages, Patrick Farmer, Daniel Jones and Lee Patterson — all, as Cornford notes, "known for their inventive approaches to amplification" — bring about a performance that takes intimacy to near claustrophobia in its realization. This isn't meant as disparaging, but marvel for the insular, sans reverb, coffee-can-buried-in-the-backyard-size-studio-space the group clings to in their stark / no effects / only cartridges (Cornford eschews the crutch of contact mics as being too "lazy...consistent...reliable") vacuum. The need to touch the "needle" to a surface of something to make it exist generates a choppy world with expectant silences, something this group wrangles into extremely fragmented bits of juxtaposed conversations; even big crashes and explosions of feedback are carefully controlled by simply removing the connection point; rung bells are robbed of their idiosyncratic attack and sustain` with the same method.
Without giving a laundry list of ambiguous "there is a fizzle, it turns into a sputter", the work renders, in a way, as an extensive 37-minute DJ set of sound-bites, each being either percussive, atonal, melodic or textural plucks, mechanical whirs, white noise, metallic rumbles (four panes in the CD art feature a host of the ensemble's accoutrement). The lengths of each range from dust specks to almost long enough to be defined as "drone — but none exceeds ten seconds. The map these are placed on separates the composition in a flowing, obvious point of change just by pausing and barely shifting materials. It's a really gorgeous, sensual array if you're attracted to, say, the meditation of star gazing or putting your face close to a garden with a magnifying glass (some of us do these things). This might be due to, being the next generation in the Cage lineage, the group's slight mutiny against the rebellion of how Cartridge Music is often performed — interpreters are often prone to play up Cage's works with sass. The desire here is to delicately (Cornford again) "extend the language of the piece away from the predominantly friction based gestures that people have used in the past."
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