This is a diverse collection of field recordings from China, recorded in a two month period by Jason Kopec. Some of the recordings are pristine, traditional instruments, snippets from tv, construction sites. The pieces vary from 30 seconds to fifteen odd minutes and the entire disc runs at just about an hour. It’s hard to know whether we’ve been spoiled by Chris Watson and the like, but perhaps a tracklisting, or any contextual information might have been nice. Thus the listener comes in blind with only their ears for reference. We have no idea where in China the recordings were made, how they were made, or even what we are listening to. There are not even any pictures, just a great expanse of orange and pink on the cover. What this forces you to do is to concentrate on the miniature of the recordings, relying solely on your ears to glean any kind of information, the size of the room, whether it was outside, if anyone else is present. Luckily the recordings are incredibly evocative, well recorded, you can hear the bells on the second track and imagine a temple or sense the outdoors during a snippet of strange quite beautiful singing. And there’ some really incredible close mic’d recordings of traditional stringed instrumentation played in distinctly no traditional ways. In fact the lack of contextual information makes you feel like a sonic detective, attempting to build in your mind an accurate representation of what Kopec actually witnessed. Kopec has billed himself as taking “sonic samples of the exotic other,’ yet one wonders whether he’ actually reinforcing this notion of the other, adding to the mystique by removing the samples from any semblance of contextual reality.
Bob Baker Fish
