Aural Aggravation

Mortality Tables – 11th July 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

And so it is that the third season of Mortality Tables LIFEFILES series – and, indeed, LIFEFILES as a project, closes as it began just over two years ago, with its thirtieth instalment coming courtesy of Simon Fisher Turner. As such, this release is appropriately titled.

The premise of the series, which we’ve covered quite extensively here over the course of its running, is that curator and Mortality Tables label owner, Mat Smith, furnishes an artist with a field recording for them to more or less do as they please. Some of the reworkings and manipulations have been quite radical; others, less so. But what each has offered is a snapshot of a particular place at a specific time, reimagined and retold at distance by a third party. If this sounds rather absurd, it’s worth considering that this is essentially how history is formed – by the interpretation and re-presentation of primary source material to create a linear narrative. But how much can we trust the narrator? Even that primary source recording is just that – a recording. It is not the actual event. Therefore, with each revision, there is a move further away from the actual event. There evolves a certain historical layering, not so much akin to the degradation of a photocopy of a photocopy, but a drawing of a drawing, subject to ever-increasing distortions, deviations, corruptions.

As the accompanying notes inform us – quite factually – ‘The LIFEFILES series commenced in March 2023 with a piece by Simon Fisher Turner made using sounds recorded at an exhibition of works by the Memphis collective at Milton Keynes Gallery. The series concludes with a final piece from Fisher Turner, again using sounds recorded at Milton Keynes Gallery, this time at an Andy Warhol exhibition.’

This piece is only a little over eleven minutes long: a single or EP rather than an album – but Simon Fisher Turner packs a lot into that time. It begins with the slow-echoing of voices, a low mutter, the sound of voices, perhaps, chattering in a gallery – slowed and distorted, there’s a sense of discomfort, of the unheimlich, before a mid-range chimes in and hovers. So far, so ambient – but then some crushing percussion batters in and from nowhere things go a bit Test Dept. Trudging industrial beats slog away relentlessly, and they’re multi-layered and multitracked and hammer away from all angles in surround sound. There are some lulls, some drops in pitch and volume, occasional rests in tempo, even – but this is first and foremost a full-on beat assault. The speakers crunch and crackle and the beats thump and stomp.

Glitching, grinding bass enters the fray around the mid-point, albeit briefly, before swiftly vanishing, replaced instead by a subsonic sonar – and then things really get ugly. There’s a violence to this beat-driven blast, which even during the moments where it’s taken down a notch or three, there’s a sense of menace, something underlying that’s uncomfortable. The delicate chiming of a singing bowl or somesuch in the last couple of minutes, even when it yields to a quiet, low rumble, does little to dissipate the tension which has built – and built. But in the end, as is always the case, the ultimate end is silence. And so it is that the circle finally closes.

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