dirty ear
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Dirty
Ear (Errant Bodies Records, 2008)
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| Hyper-constructions, neurotic representations, micro-compositions designed as counter-sonorities to specific locations or settings... - environments ingested and regurgitated as audible fantasies... CD. Released: Errant Bodies Records, 2008 |
The
boy stands broken lights The city surrounds him a live buzz He heard a
story once about how all the crows in the city were then up close like
a sudden crash the ghosts of forgotten inhabitants He thinks he is lost
hotrod Lincoln Then he remembers this corner from before Spit on the sidewalk
KING OF THE ROAD He steps over The leaves they are everywhere Brown and
crisp like old bacon The number is 1267 875993 He looks In the windows
the streetlights collect into a swarm of eyes They seem to hover and then
pierce the coming night toss it over there The man sits on a bench Bill
says the tape recorder is a medium for trauma The bus blasts by No news
is good news he thinks The film last night was terribly violent AMYNVULZ
– what the fuck? He had dreams about the one character the woman
she ran through his apartment in that blue nightgown that blue nightgown…
/ He thought it was his ex-wife X marks the spot There is a book on the
table called Sidewalk She flicks through it It’s extremely loud
in here Noise is your vehicle This music really sucks She gets up and
walks towards the window Where do you live? Stares at the streetlights
Every Highway She thinks the fall went so fast Already dark Whistling
Dixie His brother used to pin him down and force him to say things Now
he writes about it in his first novel Thwack Thwack-Thwack Bing He gets
distracted by the Woody Allen film on tv capsized ships, fallen eggs He
hears the neighbors upstairs It makes him feel less alone The kids laugh
like mad gangsters bang bang bang On the radio The Clash plays she saw
that joe strummer film lately She hums to herself When the next bus comes
by he grabs a stick and throws it Where is George He’s always late
Maybe the cops got him gotta get out of here |
Vital Weekly#635 review: At the same time there is also the release of 'Dirty Ear', which has no book which seems to be a rare thing for LaBelle these days. It uses 'dirty field recordings, found sounds, sound effects, archives and sonorous dramas. Composed as a series of micro-narratives each designed to intervene onto imagined settings or spatial locations, as counter-sonorities'. Although that last bit is a bit of abacadabra to me, the actual music is quite interesting. They are indeed micro-narratives, on quite an abstract level it seems, or at least most of the times. Hard to tell what those 'dirty' sound sources are, but there is a certain muddy aspect to the music which makes it actually quite nice. Good to hear LaBelle's doing a more regular release again. (FdW) Neural.it (Nov 2008): Field recordings, very atypical sounds and effects, envelopes unraveled in a series of documentary micro-narrations, carefully divided into different settings and limited spaces. The nine "Dirty Ear" tracks can be seen as a hypothetical prototype of studies on mobility and broadcasting, harking back to auditory dreams in precisely localized places. And although they can be private, public, metropolitan or rural spaces - not much will eventually change in regard to the determination of suggestions; they are always kept deliberately aleatory. These suggestions are playing more with the construction of the atmosphere than on following random paths for "catching" sounds. Brandon LaBelle composes an aesthetic of the everyday that is never naive, referring to the landscape more as a cultural and semiotic construct. He generates new acoustic opportunities for interaction, redefining his own specific grammars of understanding and manipulation of places. A very sophisticated project, which takes listening to the sense of transience with "stolen voices and undesirable stories", "eavesdropped conversations", "space invasions and wire-tappings", while assembling residual materials that are hard to catalogue, but which posses certain effectiveness and charm. Aurelio Cianciotta MicroBionic:
The
genre of sound art which falls under the "field recording" categorization
-everything from purely representational replications of natural environments,
to fly-on-the-wall sonic voyeurism- is one which is hard to separate from
its main acknowledged use as a 'documentary' tool, as a satisfying set
of answers to vague questions about what life must be like in physical
and psychic territories beyond one's immediate reach. So when something
like Brandon LaBelle's latest release comes along, claiming to be composed
of field recordings, yet so different in character from the usual 'man
with a microphone' venture, it does raise an eyebrow or two. Admittedly,
as far as musical taxonomy goes, these recordings come closer to the aims
and results of musique concrete than those of field recording, although
the driving element remains audio material captured from a variety of
social environments, interpersonal encounters and indistinct atmospheres. |