Three from Auscultare (Colley, Menche/Mizutani, Yau)

Joe Colley
Desperate Attempts at Beauty
Auscultare
020

Daniel Menche/Kiyoshi Mizutani
Garden
Auscultare
019

R. H.Y. Yau
Coagulation” Selected Works 1996-2000
Auscultare
018

The good folks at Ground Fault (who are affiliated with Auscultare and co-produced these recordings) recently sent along this batch and, though they originally appeared sometime last year (I notice that Nirav included two on his 2003 Year’s Best list), they’re well worth bringing up for discussion. Well, two of them are….

Joe Colley’s “Desperate Attempts at Beauty” is a wonderful collection of “conceptual and research exercises” wherein his ear for sonic deliciousness far outweighs any science experiment overtones. Using fairly minimal original sources (guessing a bit here: some contact mic work, inherent malfunctions in recording equipment—rattles, blown speakers—and water interacting with clay), Colley creates convincing and deep sound worlds with endlessly absorbing gradations. Personally, this is one of the prime characteristics I listen for in this type of music and one that seems rather difficult to achieve, that is for the disc to be as “real” (and, thereby, fascinating) as the sounds heard, for example, outside my window, when leaning against an engine housing or when listening to the interaction between the wind and a faraway airplane while sitting on a cliff. Colley is right on target here and then some, including subtly dramatic portions as when a brief, surging rhythm invades the abstract sphere of the first “Claysound” piece. Importantly in this field, Colley is quite willing to allow “nothing” to occur for extended periods, forcing the listener to hear the volumes of sounds that are, in fact, present and happily percolating away. It’s an old and curious problem to analyze why this music works so well and something like the Hegenbart disc I reviewed earlier leaves one wanting. One obvious answer may be simply that Colley’s ear and my own find some degree of overlap in the sounds we deem beautiful. But I think there’s also a fine-grained appreciation of drama at play, something of an almost narrative feel that I hear in, for example, Philip Samartzis’ work (as well as several others). Sometimes this is achieved with the introduction of rhythmic elements and their accretion and layering, as on the lovely (and enticingly titled), “Lost, Or At Last Realizing That Very Soon None of This Will Matter” which builds, subsides, builds and ebbs again in a suspense-filled manner that keeps one rapt. The final, unlisted track develops an oddly syncopated motif that, surprisingly, conjures up spoon and washboard rhythms (with manipulated static), not something you’d normally expect to hear in this kind of context. These kind of unexpected pleasures contribute to Colley’s generally solid and often profound slate of ideas in which a given work both succeeds as a whole and repays investigations into its microstructure in spades. A fine, fine recording. (A word of warning, however: on my original recording, there was a flaw in the disc which resulted in a repeated skip pattern near the end of the final cut. I wondered if this was intentional on Colley’s part, if it was a CD equivalent of a vinyl locked groove, but then saw references to it as a problem on the IHM site. When I contacted Ground Fault to inquire, I was informed that they were aware of the problem and happily sent me a replacement disc. Well, the skip appears on this one too. For myself, it doesn’t significantly detract from the overall experience, but potential buyers should be forewarned.)

“Garden”, by Daniel Menche and Kiyoshi Mizutani, is a very different sort of document, a 65-minute piece that largely remains within several degrees of its starting points in a kind of modified drone state. Mizutani is credited with the “high sounds”, Menche with the low, so it’s fairly easy to isolate the contributions of each and, indeed, one of the interesting facets of the piece is in its relative lack of a mid-range for the first 2/3 of its duration. Up top, one hears bird and insect sounds blended in with various high-pitched electronica, the bright strands inevitably evoking, given the piece’s title, the upper reaches of tree branches and perhaps some loft cirrus clouds. Underneath it all, maybe subterranean, are Menche’s deeply pitched thrums and pulsations, the roots, earthworms and, one guesses, the interred power lines beneath the flowers. This puts the listener at ground level, midway between and enveloped. It’s a luscious cocoon in which to be swathed. As with Colley, this pair is quite content to let things simmer for a good while, refusing to accede to any event-driven urge. If “something happens”, fine, if not, we’ll wait. But again, just when you think there’s not much going on, you reattune your ears and, lo and behold! this is occurring and that too! Closing in on the 40-minute mark, things get denser as an intermediate soft, white noise element (rain?) emerges, shooing the listener back under some foliage where the throbs from that buried generator are more pronounced. Gradually, that mid-ground comes to predominate, sweeping aside the highs and lows and establishing itself as a rather alien presence, replete with harsh, ringing tones that remind one of the mycological protagonists from the classic SF film, “Them”. As the piece winds down, the original balance returns, albeit with the giant ants still ambling about. It’s tempting, in a way, to think of “Garden” as ambient music but, if so, it’s some of the most riveting around—no bliss-outs here.

But then we come to Randy H.Y. Yau’s disc. I know Nirav listed it among his favorites from last year and, as I greatly respect his knowledge and taste, I might require an explanation. Perhaps it dwells, for me, in that same inaccessible-to-oldsters region as the Prurient release I was cool on but this collection of eighteen pieces, to these ears, ranges from fairly interesting to downright puerile. After a disposable opening extract from an answering machine message (a tired enough trope), Yau’s “Prescription (Excerpt 1)” is one of the disc’s stronger works, a manic agglomeration of noise piled atop enormous (and rather humorous) organ chords, an unholy grafting of Stockhausen and Keith Emerson. The second excerpt, however, and much of what follows, lurches into Eye territory, bursts of throat-rending screams alongside this or that noise explosion. The vocals have an overbearing character to them, something that, regardless of their situation in an ostensibly avant context, brings to mind the same sort of preening you hear in the most commercial of metal bands. You tended to believe Eye; Yau sounds imitative and second-hand to me. Belches form some percentage of his arsenal (actually used to nice effect on a piece like “Scherzo 7810003”) and he’s not above interpolating the odd urine stream, but fratboy antics reach their nadir on “Intermission”, six minutes of closely miked, impressively ferocious vomiting into a toilet bowl. I was trying to pin down a date when this sort of thing might have at least gotten a few points for daring, nose-thumbing provocation. Maybe 1965. Hell, maybe 1915. Tristan Tzara might be chuckling to himself. The tracks that are more purely abstract noise, or where the vocals are sublimated enough to reduce their annoyance quotient, work the best (things like the misanthropically titled, “I’ve hurt you today…I’ll do it again”) but even here there’s not a heck of a lot to distinguish them. Brutal, yes, but brutal on its own doesn’t tend to hold my interest.

Two out of three ain’t bad, though, and those two are mighty good.

~ Brian Olewnick