Aural Aggravation

Mortality Tables – 22nd November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Matthew’s Hand by Nicholas Langley is the twenty-fifth instalment in Mortality Tables’ LIFEFILES series, now in its third season. The principles of this ongoing project are simple: ‘Recordings of places, people, objects, moments in time, environments and quotidian events 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.’

Simple principles, but in actuality, giving free reign to the artist to respond to the source material offers near-infinite possibilities. And so it is that Nicholas Langley presents to six-minute pieces in the form of ‘Milton Keynes University Hospital, 3 April 2024’ and ‘Milton Keynes University Hospital, 17 April 2024’.

Label head Mat Smith provides the following context for the source material for this release: ‘On 2 April 2024, I fell over while walking near Smithfield Market on my way to work, and broke my hand. The two recordings used by Nicholas were both made at Milton Keynes University Hospital – the first while waiting for an x-ray that confirmed the fracture the following day, and then two weeks later while in the waiting room for the cast to be removed.’

I’ll spare the tale of the time I fell and broke my ribs and shredded my hand one night, but shall move to the point that for some of us, the reaction to an event which contains an element of shock and even mild trauma is to document it. Having photographed my bleeding palm, and recorded the horrendous roar of the oxygen machines which were installed in our living room for the final nights my wife was with us, I can only conclude that recording these things creates a separation which enables us to process them as being ‘media’, for wont of a better term, rather than the painful reality of our actual lives. I certainly prefer this rationale to the idea that it’s a sociopathic impulse to revel in experiences of trauma and pain.

‘Matthew’s Hand’ captures the ambient chatter and clatter of a waiting room, at least initially, before this fades out to be replaced with something that one might describe as echo-soaked abstract synth jazz. Langley applies the principles of dub reggae, but without the percussion. The sonic experience is in some ways like the lived experience of the waiting room, as the chatter dims into the distance and your head slowly swims in a sea of overwhelmed strangeness as you wish you were elsewhere.

Someone recounts the grim tale of someone who was close to a mortar explosion at the beginning of ‘A Mortar Went Off Near Him’, before heavy elongated, humming drones enter the mix, and Langley builds a dense soundscape of whistles, hums, and whooshes which owes as much to early 80s industrial as it does to more contemporary dark ambience. A monotonous throb emerges, and it’s overlaid with scrawls of feedback and sharp, needling treble. Ultimately, little happens over the course of its seven-minute duration but somehow, you feel the effect.

Taken together, the two tracks have an impact which somehow extends beyond their sound alone.

AA