Ralph Steinbruchel/Aaron Ximm/Kenneth Kirschner/Tomas Korber/Taylor Deupree - May 6, 2001

and/OAR
and/24

Composer and sound organizer Kenneth Kirschner has a habit of wandering around New York neighborhoods making recordings of the ambient noise for later processing and use. He did so in the downtown financial district one Sunday night, May 6, 2001, the streets pretty much deserted, four months prior to the area being rechristened Ground Zero.

This disc presents four reworkings of parts of Kirschner’s discoveries that evening as well as a section from the work Kirschner himself ultimately created. With the exception of that piece, in fact, enough processing has been done that it might have been all but impossible to detect even the general nature of the source material if one wasn’t so informed. The first track, “Bank” by Ralph Steinbruchel, is a tonal, smooth (a bit too smooth for my taste) wash of ringing tones over a silvery, lightly brushed background. It’s one of those works that makes its points in a couple of minutes then continues for sixteen. Aaron Ximm, a name new to me, jumbles things up a bit with a giddy, quasi-rhythmic stew that recalls some of Carl Stone’s more energetic works. Still, all the activity rather masks the real nature of the original sounds, not to mention eliminating any sense of air or spatial volume.

For that, we need to return to the project’s originator and Kirschner pays us off handsomely. His abridged version of “May 6, 2001” is a fine, dark piece. In its first half the listener is plunged into an air-filled space, an implied cavernous field beneath looming structures, subtle, looped rhythmic elements softly clicking away, echoes of traffic and trains, wind against metal. You get the sense he’s captured just a small sliver of what’s out there but a morsel that could nourish you for months. The second part is far more claustrophobic, maybe an escape into a humid, empty, threatening subway station, but extremely effective as a balance to the cool atmosphere encountered earlier. The entire original recording as well as Kirschner’s unabridged version can be downloaded here. Tomas Korber takes a very different approach from any of the other participants and, to his credit, is the one contributor whose work pretty much matches Kirschner’s in power and subtlety. 22 minutes long, “Financial District” is broken into several discreet fragments, varied in character but deployed with an innate logic that feels natural. His borrowed sounds straddle the boundary between those you can imagine having been derived from field recordings and ones that seem entirely alien. The pianissimo section full of crackles is especially lovely, a stretch of minutes that Olivia Block might envy. A corner is then turned onto an eerie space like an empty plaza out of De Chirico. The final series of crunches ends the work on a suitably unsettling note.

Taylor Deupree’s “Dust” has a spinning nature that almost evokes a carnival climate and, once again, I found myself harking back to some of Stone’s music. It’s an effective track in and of itself, though as far as the disc as a whole is concerned, I think Korber’s piece was a more fitting capstone.

“May 6, 1991” is an interesting set of music. The selections from Kirschner and Korber certainly make it worth a listen.

and/OAR