West Head juts out towards NSW’s Central Coast from Sydney’s Northern Beaches region. It’s a primordial landscape, rolling and vertiginous, steep slopes leading down to hidden beaches, topped off with ancient indigenous rock art etched into the sandstone outcrops. These outcrops a reminder of an earlier time with different cultural rules. A closely woven fabrik is the aural equivalent of a lost culture, known only from its artefacts. How can it be interpreted? Like an archaeologist employing the law of superposition to unravel the past, there are many strands and layers intertwined in this document of the ten days west head project spent on Tasmania’s Maria Island.
You could certainly say that Jim Denley is heavily invested in the culture of improvisation, field-recordings and experimentation. He’s been involved in Sydney’s sound-art scene for a few decades, and his approach and ethos has permeated into the marrow of this and other splitrec releases. His collaborators for west head project are Dale Gorfinkel and Monika Brooks on accordion. I’m always so stoked to see musicians and obvious enthusiasts like this trio following their own skewed logic to amass a significant body of work. Generally too “difficult” and esoteric for the general population, such artists work on the periphery without much fanfare or recognition outside of their own circles. I’m sure that such base motives have nothing to do with their motivations. I’m just glad that such atmospheric, delicate and site-specific sounds are available to be heard outside the context of a one-off performance.
Opening with “spruces”, a closely woven fabrik emanates a whiff of the arcane world inhabited by US composer George Crumb, local soundtrack maker Arthur Cantrill and a hint of eastern mysticism (mostly found in Jim Denley’s bamboo flute). Dale Gorfinkel installed a range of sonic contraptions in an avenue of spruces leading from a jetty, which lends “spruces” a haunting timbre and ghostly resonance (which may have been helped by the fact that Maria Island use to house a penal colony). Sine waves pulse and groan there’s a kid trapped in there, being terrorised by rambunctious Cape Barren Geese. It’s the combination of natural elements and instruments intertwining that allow “spruces” to have a very specific sense of place, whilst still remaining “musical”. “Roots” features the deadened sound of Gorfinkel playing dried upended tree roots in response to Denley’s sax. Towards the end of this piece there’s a hypnotic gurgling / strumming like a thousand angry bees hurtling out of the hive. “Glade’s” ululations, prepared trumpets and balloons sound like butoh for the ears, or maybe a mutant jazz ensemble of irradiated jellyfish and midgets. All in all, west head project’s lowercase sounds and environmental ambience intertwine to produce an evocative soundworld.
Oliver Laing
