Aural Aggravation

Mortality Tables – 16th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

For myriad reasons, my head’s a shed of late, and I’ve been doing this for coming up for sixteen years now, cranking out reviews on a more or less daily basis, sometimes during certain spells up to five or six in a day and taking in three or four live shows in a week, on top of dayjob and, since 2011, parenting. So I can be forgiven for not remembering every artist I’ve covered, let alone the details. But somewhere along the way, on seeing this arrive in my inbox, I recall that I have written about Ergo Phizmiz. I have no idea what I wrote, or when, whether I dug it or not, what kind of music it was, but I did write. Ergo Phizmiz isn’t a name one forgets easily, after all.

And so it is that ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ is the sixth release in the second season of Mortality Tables’ ‘LIFEFILES’ series, a series of singles whereby ‘Recordings of places, people, objects, moments in time, environments and quotidian events are shared with a range of artists working with sound. Those artists are then free to respond to the recordings in any way they like, either through manipulation or composition.’

Seems I’ve got some catching up to so, since, ‘Season 01 of the LIFEFILES series commenced in March 2023 with contributions from Simon Fisher Turner, Veryan, Xqui, Rupert Lally, Andrew Spackman and Dave Clarkson,’ and ‘Season 02 commenced in September 2023 with contributions so far from Audio Obscura, Todeskino, boycalledcrow, Simon Fisher Turner, Maps and Ergo Phizmiz.’

The one thing about arriving at a late point in a series and not even in the first season of singles, over a TV series is that there’s no cause for consternation over the plot arc or who the characters are or their back-stories. A single is a single, and it should, by its nature, stand alone, free of the context of series or album, and ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ does.

As the accompanying notes inform us, ‘The following three source sounds were chosen at random:

1. Loud bass music played from a car at the Akeman Inn, Bucks (21.06.2021)

2. A rubber lid stretched across a ramekin (07.07.2022)

3. Seren playing an old acoustic guitar (01.11.2023)’

Phizmiz’s response is to hurl them all together at random, too. ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ begins with a roaring barrage of noise, the roaring thrum of an engine and what I understand to be ‘loud bass music’. On ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’, Phizmiz doesn’t collage or overlap the source materials – which would likely have produced an utterly head-smashing cacophony – instead favouring a different kind of cut-up method, akin to the ‘drop-in’ method devised by Burroughs and Gysin, whereby the different segments are dropped in, ‘randomly’. The sources follow one another, and it’s a haphazard-sounding patchwork of unrelated sounds, although the rubber lid and acoustic guitar aren’t as different as one might anticipate.

‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ is strange, and interesting, and as an experimental assemblage, it isn’t designed to be accessible or musical, or conform to any conventional expectations of a ‘single’. This is nothing more and nothing less than an artistic response to a set of parameters set as part of an experiment – and one that’s novel in its directness and simplicity.

AA