Loren Chasse - the air in the sand

Loren Chasse
the air in the sand
naturestrip
NS3004

Chasse is a San Francisco-based sound artist, a teacher in the school system there and a member of the groups Thula and idBattery. Naturestrip’s previous release was Toshiya Tsunoda’s superb “Scenery of Decalcomania”, another venture into processed field recordings, making “the air in the sand” an interesting point of comparison. While Tsunoda tends to funnel his captured sounds through or between devices of his own making, as near as I can tell Chasse seems to record the sounds “as is”, manipulating, layering and otherwise messing with them later on in the studio. Perhaps peculiar to this recording (I believe I’ve only previously heard Chasse in idBattery), the results have something of a muted character, a wind-buffeted aspect which, after all, is entirely in keeping with the disc’s title. If, given my druthers, I lean towards Tsunoda’s crispness, even harshness, Chasse’s work still has plenty of rewards on its own.

On the opening, title track, Chasse, as elsewhere, conjures up vaguely melodic motifs from his sourced sounds, sculpting tones created by moving air into modulating notes that recall those achieved by blowing across the open tops of bottles. There’s only a limited sense of a specific place—these don’t strike me as narrative pieces in a geographical way despite the occasional crickets or bird calls, though a “story-line” is sometimes suggested—more of a layered evocation of a given phenomena, richer and more complex than you might hear in situ. It’s as if Chasse is depicting the myriad ways one might perceive air coursing through a given location if only one sat and listened for a few months—compressed into 17 minutes. The moment-to-moment detail might get sacrificed to a generalized view of the scene but then this wide-angle approach offers delicacies for your ears that may not have been otherwise audible. An interesting kind of choice to have to make. Experienced purely on a sensual level (and why not?), the music is a wonderful place in which to wallow. “the tree on the sky” contrasts rumbles of an almost watery nature with wooden clicks and sand-blown hisses with eerie effectiveness, imparting an urgent, rushing feel to the music that has one “looking” ahead, avoiding being aurally dashed against upcoming flotsam and jetsam. As advertised, the bulk of “the air inside the rain” appears to have been constructed with dozens of overlaid rainfalls, a hyper-dense sheet through which the odd bird attempts to maneuver. The piece mutates slowly, dull thuds just on the verge of hearing (passing traffic outside?) emerge, high-pitched tones from far away glimmer in and out, an airplane’s engine suddenly intrudes; all the while, the rainfall is constant, a deluge. The musical tones that coalesce briefly on this track have something of a guitar-like quality—for just a moment, it sounded like a snippet from a Godspeed You Black Emperor! performance. Chasse saves the best for last, though, and “the air against the ground” closes out the disc brilliantly. Fairly steady-state, he pares things down to a fascinating core of air and overtones, a drone that’s constrained but still dirty enough to leave a mark, the atmosphere sufficiently sooty and blemished, that you simply “buy” it as a natural phenomenon. Very good stuff.

Btw, in case anyone’s keeping count, that makes naturestrip’s line score a solid four for four so far.