Mortality Tables – 7th June 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
Mortality Tables have continued to release titles from their ‘Life Files’ series at a remarkable rate, with instalments 18 and 19 landing in May, and hot on their proverbial heels, this, number 20, in the first week of June.
The premise remains consistent, namely ‘Recordings of places, people, objects, moments in time, environments and quotidian events [which] are shared with a range of artists working across different disciplines. Those artists are free to respond to the recordings in any way they like. And so, as ever, the field recordings, courtesy of Mortality Tables main man Mat Smith provide the foundation and inspiration.
Killiegrew Monument is a peculiar thing. Located in Falmouth, and intended as a memorial to the last surviving member of the Cornish family, the monument is a sharp obelisk constructed in 1738. It looks altogether more contemporary, and ultimately anomalous with its surroundings. And one might say that this release is similarly anomalous. I can imagine that beholding this curious construction would inspire an array or reactions. But why the fuck would you play a stone monument with a sharp stone? Is that really one of the responses you’d likely have to coming face to face with such a construction? Well, perhaps, if you’re possessed of an avant-garde mindset, whereby instead of reflecting on the origins of The Wind in the Willows, you find yourself contemplating ways of making unusual noises.
Once again, when it comes to the ‘Life Files’ series on Mortality Tables, we don’t know what the source materials actually sound like.
‘Killigrew Monument Played With A Sharp Stone (Part One)’ is an odd sound work: there’s chatter and ambient drift and scratches and shuffles and scrapes, but what on earth is going on? Seagulls wheeling and cawing – and on those squawks the sound echoes and reverberates, and the collage of sound collides with a strange rendition of ‘One, two, three four five, once I caught a fish alive’.
There’s lots of processed echo and cawing gulls at the start of ‘Killigrew Monument Played With A Sharp Stone (Part Two)’, as well, and it does, in some respects, sound like someone crooning abstractly into a child’s echo mic just to see how it sounds. The longer of the two pieces, at almost thirteen minutes in duration, it creates a deeply strange and disorientating atmosphere, which is likely evocative of this curious monument, which stands out of time and out of keeping with its surroundings as a testament to human folly, and, ultimately to vanity.
Too abstract to be ‘songs’, too much happening to be ‘ambient’, the result is a haunting and somewhat disorientating soundwork of a rare quality.
AA
Aural Aggravation 