When I look at a table I see a tree. When I look at a plane I see a bird. Call me obtuse but the abstraction of nature into formed objects does not strike me as an ambiguity or something to create a movement around. So when it comes to listening to a compilation of field recordings of industrial machinery, robotics, adjustments of a car mirror, boat ropes, streetcar, rainclock… ,as presented on this compilation Rhythm , I am almost ready to go marching down the street with a placard bearing ‘don’t just protect your environment, create it’. That the sense of field recording presented on this disk is of some of the highest standard these ears have heard yet and that the subject matter is not of the obvious nature sounds is quite an obtuse joy.
Peter Cusack’s (England) ‘Through the Robots’ opens the album with a pristine rhythm sound movement of the abstracted sound world that is high tech industrial endeavor of the robotic construction within the Jaguar car manufacturing plant. It is quite a swingless noise affair, oh joy! Erick La Casa (France) matter of fact documentation of a mill in ‘Clisson: Moulin de Gervaux’ captures all the sounds of the movement and play of the building condensed and heightened showing all the movements and tensions of this active building. Takahiro Kawaguchi (Japan) recording ‘for example #01’ is the strangest placed on the album as it is a atmospheric recording set in a rural setting with a repetition of the number one at distinct intervals. Dale Lloyd (USA) ‘1928 Australian Streetcar’ is just that, a journey in such a streetcar, (American for tram), presumably through San Francisco, with all the ensuing noise of the device, passengers and environs.
It’s almost a disappointment that this album closes with Walter Tilgner’s (Germany) ‘Tag, Mittelspecht’, which is a gem of nature recordings from his Spring Concert in Riverrain Forest album. It is hard to discern whether it is a condensed and constructed nature symphony or a presentation of found sound. Tilger (born 1934) has a long history in this field and a great number of releases to his name and the general idea of field recordings owes a great deal towards this tendency. That this album ends in this place, which is perhaps a sense of its forms beginnings, is interesting in the idea of the compilation as a through international survey of the contemporary practice of field recordings.
Innerversitysound
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