Loren Chasse’s sound doesn’t feel composed. It feels fluid, messy, yet evolving. It feels outside human control, like a force of nature. I view Footpath an innovative and curious form of ambient composition, one that doesn’t pigeonhole things neatly in musical or even sound art techniques, and is content to let the roughage show. He’s using field recordings of a place and then is manipulating the sound making objects he finds in that place, rubbing rocks, walking, dragging things, recording the wind in the trees (and on the mic), and coalescing all of these sounds into these waves, surges of activity that build and subside without you really understanding why, what force of nature provoked the movement. It’s a mixture of field recordings from footpaths in California mixed with live performances in Berlin, Torino, Tarcento and San Francisco, and it’s difficult to tell what comes from where. Chasse loves texture, things crinkle, crackle, tear and rub, even the microphone doesn’t feel static, it’s moving around, as involved as the action itself. He uses a cymbal in the same way, like it’s being played by a natural force. Chasse’s compositions seem devoid of human intent even when there’s a quick strum of guitar amongst the bluster, or a warm mechanical drone. In fact throughout some of these pieces, it almost feels like there’s some light experimental music going on almost subliminally next door, perhaps leaking through a window, where we only catch what the wind wants us to hear. Whilst some of the experimental drone music does increase in volume, it is utilised in a similar manner to the field recordings, revealed, obscured, flowing, changing. The other pieces revolve around field recordings from a park in Maryland and a Bird Sanctuary in California where he does this amazing thing of obscuring the foreground of the sound, with ticks and small indecipherable movements, whilst allowing the background to ring out unhindered. It’s a technique that produces a curiously unnerving affect. This is his second album on Naturestrip and somewhat of a departure from the summery warmth of The Air In The Sand, in fact aside from his work in the Jeweled Antler Collective, this is the first I’ve heard where he is integrating (albeit subtly) musical elements into the mix. Of course the music is as fractured yet flowing as the field recordings and it’s the merging the two that provides the fascination on this mysterious and engrossing work.
Bob Baker Fish
