Tom Hall - Fluere

Nightrider Records

Though sourced from what would generally be considered field recordings, Tom Hall’s “Fluere” has a distinct air of composition about it; in essence, it strikes me as closer to musique concrete. The source in question is the Story Bridge in Brisbane, Australia and the sounds utilized have evidently been culled from a massive catalog compiled by Hall over the course of a year or so. Thus reconfigured, the disc sets up an interesting dichotomy for the listener. You can’t really hear it as a “field recording”; the artifice is too clear and there’s little real sense of natural flow and atmosphere. So you tend to neglect the origins of the sounds themselves, instead focusing on how they’re organized, sequentially, in opposition, etc. The instances where those two streams imperceptibly merge are where the real juice resides.

This placed me in something of a quandary when I found myself more interested in the resonances of a given sound or series of sounds than the manner in which they were arrayed on the track in question. The bridge, not surprisingly, is a trove of deep, cavernous tones, recoverable from contact mics placed at various points. The interactive vibrations caused by vehicular traffic echo deeply into the structure producing booming throbs and dull roars, augmented by dozens of other, less bass-oriented tones occupying hiss and click territory. You can easily imagine sidling up to a stanchion, laying your ear on the metal and luxuriating in the sonic bath. Hall collects these elements, chopping and dicing them into more clearly directional compositions, constructing various rhythmic patterns (though these tend not to stay in one groove overly long, a good thing), overlaying higher pitched washes and patterns, often lining the bottom with a selection from those hyper-deep pulses. For this listener, the results are more successful the more expansive the end product, the less hemmed in by rhythmic constraints, the more—too the extent I can determine this, which may be minimal—the original sounds are allowed to be themselves. This occurs most strongly on tracks like “Fluere through the Metal Hair”, where the huge rumbles seem to billow, cloudlike, into the atmosphere and, in a different sense, on the ensuing “3,227,416” where the compounded traffic sounds, from engine growls to bridge-segment tire clicks, coalesce into a an imposing, and not a little bit terrifying, mass. “Undulated Fluctus Wave” also creates a thick, sweeping wash of low scrapes and repetitive, metallic echoes that build into an impressive, almost monstrous vortex, the bridge assuming the guise of living, respiring behemoth. On pieces like this one, where Hall succeeds in concocting a visceral entity apart from the source, you really get the sense of the possibilities in this approach. I’ll be curious to see where he goes from here. In the meantime, fans of that nexus between natural (even if manmade) sounds and their deconstruction and reconstitution can find a good deal to chew on during “Fluere”.

Tom Hall’s site