Room40 – 2nd June 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
I’ve been engrossed by Lawrence English’s works for some years now, and my appreciation of him and his methods were only enhanced when I conducted an interview with him about ten years ago for a now-defunct site (so many are now: the idea that once online it’s there forever has been proven false, and we’re all sitting, bewildered by as rapidly-vanishing archive of the recent past), where we touched on cut-ups and William Burroughs and I was struck by the depth of his knowledge and references.
But I have grave concerns around future history, or the future of history. While the move to digital was hailed as a move toward permanence, incorruptibility, the opposite has proved true. No-one writes anything down anymore, no-one produces additional. tape copies. If your hard-drive gets fucked, so does your entire library. The Cloud? Do you even know where it is? Does it even exist?
While we reflect on this, let us also consider this album and its slow gestation. David Toop is another artist I’ve spent some time listening to, and writing about, including his Breathing Spirit Forms three-way collaboration with Akio Suzuki and Lawrence English, but this is the first time just the pair of them have worked together, and Lawrence explains its evolution as follows: ‘Over the years, David and I have shared an interest in both the material and immaterial implications of sound (amongst other things). Moreover we’ve connected many times on matters which lies at the fringes of how we might choose to think about audition, our interests seeking in the affective realm that haunts, rather than describes, experience. The Shell That Speaks The Sea very much resonates from this shared fascination… I’m not exactly sure when we first mooted this duet, but I sense its initial trace is now more than a decade ago. I tend to live by the motto of ‘right place, right time’ and I believe David likely also subscribes to this methodology. A couple of years ago, David and I reignited the duet conversation and began exchanging materials. As a jumping off point, I explored a series of field recordings that, for me at least, captured something of this affective haunting that I mentioned previously’.
And haunting it is: ghosts of memories and fragments of half-recollections lurk and loom amidst the thick, dark shadows forged by the unsettling sounds. The title suggests an album of soft ambient washes, a gentle tidal swash, a soothing, tranquil work. It is not.
‘Abyssal Tracker’ is remarkably atmospheric in a sparse, gloomy, sense, and provides a fitting introduction to the duo’s idiosyncratic work, compiling sighs and vocal rasps over elongated strains of feedback and a suffocating atmosphere. Shrill shrieks echo out over eerie notes and a scratching insectoid clamour in the trebly range. Thuds ripple beneath the surface: there is so much texture and detail here, you find yourself looking about nervously, seeking the various sources and to see what’s over your shoulder, or hovering above your head.
Clanks and clatters and clanks and thuds are the dominant features of this album, and is lasers fire into the abyss of emptiness on the dense and disturbing ‘Reading Bones’, which scratches and scrapes, while there are earth-churning low-range disturbances – and words, but they’re indecipherable, spoken in low, whispering grunts, and it’s impossible to decipher even the language, sounding as it does like an ancient incantation.
It’s not all quite so skin-pricklingly tense, but much of it is: ‘Mouth Cave’ is dark, dank, low and rumbling, but has textures and what sounds like the trickle of running water spattering in the background amidst the cavernous gloom, and if ‘Whistling in the Dark’ sounds like a simplistic description, it’s accurate – but also suspenseful, scary and bordering on horror tropes; the whistling is deranged and floats through a heavy, crackling doomy drone. There are more ominous mutterings amidst the creeping darkness of ‘The Chair’s Story’, which feels like casting a look back through the ages through a thick fog at scenes of torture and pain and great sorrow and forward, to a laser-bleeping future.
As I seem to be prone to lately, I found myself nodding through fatigue but also, simultaneously, tense and alert during The Shell That Speaks The Sea, an album which possesses vast sonic expanses and a bleak, oppressive atmosphere. Each track offers something different, and this only accentuates the ‘otherness’ of the music this album contains; it’s like walking through a series of disturbing dreams, whereby each scene presents a new unfamiliar setting, and there are hints of BBC Radiophonic Workshop and vintage sci-fi about this incredibly imaginative work.
It may have taken a long time to piece together, but the results make the labour more than worthwhile.
AA
Aural Aggravation 