As so much communication exhausts itself in the practical function of contact to the detriment of any sort of content, the conversation sound artist Richard Francis holds with field recordings of indoor and outdoor spaces exists in a markedly different vein. It doesn’t see the latter partake in a game of manipulation – endeavoring to make the objects – various woods, plastics, fabrics, etc – speak or confess, to transform them into repositories of memory, nor does he invest them as a fetish and employ them in an attempt at identifying himself.
No deciphering of these three works is to be had in the least, not on a scale of meaning at any rate. Progress is made only in terms of their sensory effect: an undivided attention to tactility, pitch, loudness, and timbre rewards and then some. If any history is touched upon, it’s constructed in the way in which these fleeting sonic impressions draw one so deeply into their hazy, sometimes harsh surfaces, out of one’s own narrative, out of one’s own sense of time and place, and into another’s in a manner that prefigures one’s own mortality. An emotional charge is in this sense felt and, in fact, a mutual abreaction often seems to be taking place. Hence a common thread and inextricable tie is established between oneself and the work, a certain null equivalent; and hence perhaps the reason for the albums title.
With an inimitable deadpan delivery, the settings are rendered spare to an extreme – indeed, rather than reconciling, most aspects are pushed to the outer limits – often entirely concentrating on tiny, splintery tones and odd, glaucous washes of sound color.
The second track stands out as the most thespian, abounding in a sort of swollen minimalism, a clinical mosaic of fluctuating electricity and granular murk. This album attains to a sense of uniqueness and duration over the course of its some thirty minutes. Pieces are entrenched in a liminal time, a spasm in which what has been and what will be steals away.
Max Schaefer
