For Three Locations five sound artists submitted three field recordings, and were in turn provided with three field recordings, with which they were charged with producing a new piece. The website makes mention of the source material, ‘spanning the docks of Norway to mountains in southern Japan, from the French Atlantic Coast to an underground river tunnel hidden beneath Australia‘s urban depths’, but otherwise we’re in anonymous pure-sound territory, left either to ponder the origins of these sounds, or to submit to the rich and flowing soundworld we’re presented with.
It’s difficult to determine how much manipulation these artists have performed on their material, but my assumption is that it was minimal, restricting themselves to mere editing and rearrangement, like the ‘collages’ of Francisco Lopez. Like Lopez, sounds come and go, fading or cutting abruptly, and there seems to be a wide-eyed – or rather wide-eared – fascination with natural sounds divorced from their context. Indeed, that is how contributor Els Viaine describes it: ‘an abstract landscape which is shaped by an imagination that grew out of the texture of the sounds rather than from site-specific memories.’
The contributors may take different approaches but particular tones tend to be favoured – flowing water, white-noise, cascading waves, rural hum, urban din, blurred conversation and distant traffic – and in these sounds alone, all precisely recorded, there’s enough detail to get lost in. Toy Bizarre’s ‘kdi-dctb-215-[c]‘ turns up the reverb such that the hiss and pop – of rain on tin perhaps? – takes on the dub greys of Chain Reaction. Tarab’s ‘Eicophobia’ flits between moods like a digitised Aki Onda, rolling hiss, speech (French?) and pachinko chaos, but settles into an abstract calm. Felicity Mangan focuses on machine-like tickings and plays with stereo effects, while Klimek collapses everything into a dense and multi-layered drone, which loses all detail but manages to be the most beautiful piece here.
Joshua Meggitt
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