McFall, Behrens, Haptic and Higashi on entr'acte

Christopher McFall
Four Feels for Fire
E42

McFall hails from Kansas City and this work derives from field recordings capturing his home town during the heat of the summer, 2006. Recorded via analog deck, the tape was then extracted, its contents run through various software for the final result. In his list of “thank you’s”, McFall mentions Asher Thal-Nir and that’s not a bad point of reference. Like Asher, McFall culls essences from his tapes and tends to isolate quasi-tonal drones from among the sounds over which other elements, sometimes recognizable, more often not, mingle. During the third and longest of the five tracks, the mix is especially mysterious, most of the sounds almost recognizable including perhaps even flames. He might not achieve quite the poetic level that Olivia Block manages to do with some regularity, but McFall’s in the same ballpark here. “Four Feels for Fire”, calmly laying out its very wide, rich sonic palette, is a solid addition to the ranks of enhanced soundscapes.

Marc Behrens
Architectural Commentaries 4&5
E45

Behrens also makes use of processed field recording although, as the title implies, there’s a far greater feeling of architectural space, of heavy materials, than in the McFall. There are sounds like stone on stone, for example, large stones. To the extent they offer images of cityscapes, they do so in a De Chirico sense, one of empty concrete canyons and long shadows. There’s a brief bustle or two, a sudden flurry of traffic, but then it’s back to the urban desolation. A short track separates the two main pieces; though it’s entirely of a piece with them, its concision serves to orient the listener with regard to the others. The first half of “Commentary 5” is even emptier than its predecessor, a place of drips, vague, distant echoes of machinery, the occasional low thrum of some subterranean engine. Midway through, an eerie, silvery drone emerges accompanied by quasi-musical pings, backwards tape swatches and gurgles. It’s kind of like coming upon a barely functioning outpost in the ruins. It dissipates after a few minutes, bringing us back into the ozone-tinged vacuum. Behrens has created some evocative work, very effective and accomplished of its kind.

Haptic
Correction
E47/A67 (co-released on Absurd)

A 7” 45rpm release containing two brief but exceedingly dense works by this trio (Steven Hess, Joseph Mills and Adam Sonderberg), post-composed by combining excerpts from live performance with existing music. The brevity is more than a little perverse as both pieces positively beg for further listening and/or development. “sum” has a percussive feel, though the whole is encased in a slightly blurry envelope, bangs and clatter set against soft, high drones at the start. That direction is abruptly dropped in favor of the reverse: low, hugely throbbing pulses with higher-pitched brushwork. This, in turn, falls through a trapdoor, replaced for several fleeting seconds by a crowd of people as heard from behind a wall. All in about four minutes; wonderful stuff. “ybo” is a bit more obscure in that as near as I can determine it consists solely of a steady series of gong sounds, the kind created with heavily padded mallets (or hands). In this case, you almost inevitably read the music as an introduction of sorts. Indeed, it sounds like more than one opening invocation heard on old Art Ensemble records. But it too passes through in just a few minutes. Intriguing and frustrating in equal amounts.

Yôko Higashi
hamaYôko
E48

A collection of thirteen songs, sung and otherwise performed by Higashi, they dwell somewhere between art rock and ritualism with the odd tinge of cabaret here and there. I’ve never seen her perform but I understand, and can see in a couple of videos available on You Tube (one with Lionel Marchetti), that she incorporates drama and dance movement in her performances and these pieces seem to fit into that conception, the vocals especially having something of a theatric, even overwrought aspect. Higashi embeds all this in noise trappings—static, various abstract field recordings, drones of differing textures—but at heart, they’re songs and not terribly attractive ones. For this listener, there was too much fence-straddling; I’d rather have heard pure songs or not. A piece like “Sarasate” comes closest to achieving a kind of warped, effective chanson but might have done better performed “straight”. Aside from that number, little stood out from the routine.

entr’acte