Mortality Tables – 17th January 2025
Christopher Nosnibor
Given Mortality Tables’ liking for location-based field recordings, Circuits From Soft Frequencies makes for a comfortable fit in their rapidly-expanding catalogue.
As the liner notes explain, Circuits From Soft Frequencies originated ‘as a four-channel sound art installation developed using field recordings from sites around the South East of England.’
‘Drawing on soundtracks taken from 70s minimalist sci-fi films, both the samples used and the overall composition are based on different terrains encountered during Jamie’s field trips, describing huge shingle beaches, swamps and clifftops. The installation which was exhibited at MK Calling in Milton Keynes during the summer of 2024 also consisted of fabricated ‘cymbal speakers’, incorporating sensor-based technology to respond to changes in their environment.’
The cover art depicts one of the ‘sound mirrors’ which were constructed at various sites around the UK shortly between the world wars as an experimental early warning system, as a precursor to radar. While there are sound mirrors at two sites in Kent, those at Denge are the most renowned and best preserved, and it was here, one assumes, that the recordings of percussion, ‘incorporating cymbals, bells, gongs and clocks’, took place.
The installation, the notes go on to explain, ‘repurposes four cabinet speakers to transmit sounds collected during field trips to sites featuring [the] huge, concrete sound mirrors’.
This release contains a nineteen-and-a-half-minute recording of the installation, and highly atmospheric it is, too. Ther ticking watch not only keeps time, but gives a sense of tension and urgency which runs fast, in contrast to the long, low, reverby thuds and slow splashes of cymbals. That everything – apart from the watch – sounds somehow dulled, muffled – only adds to the atmosphere. It’s likely that this eerie, swampy echoiness is the product of the location, which features not only the thirty-foot concave ‘ear’ shown on the cover, but a two-hundred foot concrete wall. Images of the site stir the imagination, and one gets the impression to actually be in the presence of these strange-looking objects must be truly awe-inspiring. The sounds which emanate from the speakers while listening to Circuits From Soft Frequencies evoke the same sense of the alien, the otherworldly. Spurs of noise occasionally burst through, interjections of dissonance pulse through the building layers of sonic collage to unsettling effect.
It’s a reminder that often, the most alien and seemingly otherworldly creations are, in fact, man-made – and often connected in some way to war, and mankind’s destructive tendencies. I was struck, not so long ago, by the quite chilling experience of touring the cold war bunker in York – not a place of refuge, but a cramped and claustrophobic subterranean observatory which, in the event of the fulfilment of its purpose, would assure the deaths of its crew.
The sound swells and glitches, scratches and hums, and at times exudes a nightmarish quality that makes your muscles tense and your scalp tighten and crawl. It’s a remarkable piece of work, but one of those where the end comes as something of a relief.
AA
Aural Aggravation 