My first attraction to this release was some interesting artwork – a slightly surreal b&w landscape image on transparency sticky-taped to a grey card sleeve, packaged with a sheet of bizarre paper made from woven pieces of coarse metal tinged strips of thin bark-like material. And then there were the title references to visual artists, namely Angus MacLise and Jackson Pollock. (etre) is Italian experimentalist Salvatore Borrelli.
There are two quite successful, 25 minute each tracks on the release. Improvisations on various stringed instruments such as guitar, lap steel, zither and esraj are processed and blended with found and field recordings to evocative effect. At one point in ‘Endstation Palindromes (for Angus Maclise)’, an Indian drone makes way for what sounds like crowd chants at an Italian football match, only for the crowd to be subsumed by the resurgent drone accompanied by a gang of digital glitches and other crackles, which subtlely merge into train rattles. This kind of eclectic jumping around keeps the mind occupied, first in identifying the sounds, then in establishing contexts for those sounds, then in trying to establish connections between them. You are encouraged to maintain a tight cerebral connection to proceedings, and that is where this release works best.
Similar sonic journeys are travelled on the second track, ‘Music For Nobody And YOU (for Jackson Pollock)’, flipping between digital, analog, electric and electronic sounds. The movement of water in a variety of sizes and forms (drips, waves, waterfalls) work as excellent aural simulations of a Pollock painting. Some cliched orgasm simulations which creep in here and there undermine in places but are, thankfully, relatively brief.
Overall, it is the jarring juxtapositions of sounds blended seamlessly which are this release’s greatest achievement. You are constantly transported to a remarkable range of divergent audio (and, by association, physical) spaces without realising there’s been much of a transition. This constant disorientation keeps you on your toes, never allowing you to disengage from what you are listening to.
Adrian Elmer
