That rare thing, experimental sound art with a message – although it helps if you read what the message is before listening. In this case it’s a comment on his local government’s disregard for the preservation of local heritage, it’s crass vote-buying come election time, and it’s neglect of the less fortunate in society such as the homeless and unemployed. Sound familiar? Small world. The album starts with Non-Constructive Construction. It manipulates a field recording of construction sounds borrowed from an artist called Cornucopia into a yo-yoing grumble and hiss. It seems to rely quite heavily on simple Auto-Pan for processing before dissolving into soft rain. Things pick up with Paradise Paving which sounds like its beats are also created from construction. It’s spattered with a synthesised pneumatic drill while a single note mournfully loops, reminiscent of a distant fog horn. For me this is the most successful musical evocation of the album’s theme. Throughout the album, processed natural sounds weave in and out of tunnels of abstracts. There are some interesting sounds on here, and some lovely evolving textures. And that’s where I should come clean. I can’t help wishing he would do more with it. I have been exposed to a fair number of these projects and own several CDs of processed abstract sound. But I almost never listen to them more than once or twice. If a few more of these sounds were formed into slightly more structured tracks like Paradise Paving I could listen and enjoy more often. Ther albm closes wthContainer Anxiety (version) There’s a scratchy, speakerphone-like conversation at the end, where two men discuss the phenomenon of feeling the need to fill a CD with 78 minutes of sound just because you can. This nicely returns us to the theme of the album, but also begs the question – sure,you can process sound into abstract pieces of amorphousness, as many people do at the moment, but does that mean you should? I don’t know the answer, by the way.
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