From undigestible sounds to those that took to being linked into significant phrases, Solemn Words For A Fabled Apparatus is music as the threshold of merest presence. Here incipient intentions, only ever intermittent, are energized as recurring ciphers, pale – probably doomed – traces that, however unknowingly, are suggestive of the ubiquitous.
The work isn’t a pursuit, nor an act of reification, and this plainly helps the particular from becoming a token in these processed works for field recordings. An overtly planned observation brings about such alteration of the object that it is annulled, and the process takes on a certain circularity. For all their clarity and exactness, such projects have a whiff of something musty about them. On this occasion, the sounds came to McFall quite spontaneously, unknowingly even, during a difficult period of abrupt transitions in his life, when he took to roving the streets. With what seems like only some minute alteration, the sounds thus take shape in fresh combination, sounding with a full and oftentimes haunting aura, with an obscure depth and vivacity.
The sounds aren’t identified, then, that is to say their differences aren’t lulled into equivalences, but the proceedings aren’t arbitrary either. On the second piece, the air is alive with electricity, with incidental city sounds poised, eager, pathetic, like so many snapping white flags, as clouds lower tattered rain streaks. With the third track McFall’s hand is perhaps most visible: the air growls as a noxious ambient gas seeps out, harboring underneath pulses that thump like trains. With few tools on hand, McFall envelops one in a sonic ecosystem, one that is unsettled and of no illumination, one that is all the better for it.
Max Schaefer
