Posts Tagged ‘location’

Simon Fisher Turner – Closing the Circle

Posted: 13 July 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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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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Xqui – Charing Cross Underground

Posted: 18 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Mortality Tables – 16th May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Just three weeks after the previous instalment in the extensive LIFEFILES project from Mortality Tables, now in its third season, comes what promises to be the final instalment for now. And all proceeds from this release will be paid to CALM – the Campaign Against Living Miserably. It seems fitting, given that life can often feel relentless, amped-up stress and bewilderment, and the LIFEFILES series has presented, over its duration, works which take the listener into audio representations of calmer environs. I write this as someone who has, in recent years, factored a daily walk into their routine, as much for the mental health benefits as for the physical exercise. A change of scenery, particularly in open spaces and away from crowds, can be a transformative experience.

The premise of the series, for anyone who hasn’t seen any of my previous coverage, is that the artist is given a field recording, captured by Mat Smith, who runs the label, to respond to in any way they feel appropriate. For this release, the accompanying notes record that the two tracks have been constructed using ‘Source recordings made by Mat Smith at Charing Cross Underground Station on 27 November 2021, as part of a Hidden London tour of disused areas of the station and areas not normally accessible by the public.’

In addition, there’s an excerpt from Smith’s journal, from the same date, which reads as follows: “…walked around the old station section of the Jubilee Line that isn’t used any longer, went into a construction tunnel underneath Trafalgar Square which had a bend in it to avoid the foundations of Nelson’s Column, and then finished up in a ventilation shaft above the Northern Line platform…”

Xqui’s treatment of the recording is interesting, taking the form of the ‘classic’ experimental work, the likes of which you’ll find on labels like Editions Mego, with a single longform track occupying each side. The first, ‘Charing Cross Underground’, captures the voice of what may be a tour guide, spun out in reverb and glitching echo, while trans rumble in the distance, before slowly melting into ambient abstraction. It’s like hearing the ghosts of the underground, rising up through the disused tunnels, calling out to the present to remind us of the past beneath our feet. There are flickers of chatter, as if, here in the present, we continue to talk without ever stopping to listen. Voices warp, slow, slur, distort, and it makes for an unsettling fifteen minutes.

‘Reverb Underground’ goes slower, more spacious, more echoey. I had half-expected something resembling a dub version, but instead, Xqui slows and stretches everything beyond recognition, creating a slow-motion blur, a crawling ambient drone. The sound simply hangs, dense, suffocating. Time stalls, and you find yourself floating, in suspense, in a fugue state, as the sound lifts free of context and embraces pure abstraction.

What Xqui manages to convey on this release is a sense of history, of space, of time, and the way we’re so busy rushing about in our daily lives that we never pause to contemplate the echoes of the past which exist, and linger all about us.

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Ian Wellman – Can You Hear The Street Lights Glow

Posted: 29 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 3rd January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Ian Wellman’s works are usually responses to environmental issues, be they derived from articles covering global matters or more immediate or personal situations. His latest, Can You Hear The Street Lights Glow, sits very much in the latter category, as he details in the accompanying notes, which I shall quote in full:

I moved to Pasadena during the fall last year. One of the first new sounds I noticed were the mercury-vapor street lights that filled the air as the sun went down every evening. Under the sidewalks, exhaust vents hummed along to the song of crickets and the rumble of traffic. Being away from the inner city, more individual details in the soundscape emerged.

As a way to explore the new area, I walked around at night with my equipment. I placed geophones and contact mics on every metal surface I could. I ran electromagnetic sensors across electronics accessible by the sidewalk. I put mics out on quiet streets, behind shopping areas, and in parking lots. I felt very compelled and inspired to listen and learn about my new home. Can You Hear The Streetlights Glow? is the result of these listenings.

Certainly, the first part of this is something I find quite specifically relatable – not due to relocation, but to finding myself suddenly discovering a heightened awareness of my immediate surroundings. Like many people, I used to walk around with earphones in, listening to music to cut out the noise around me. This was essential on my daily commute, as listening to music as I walked through town created a separation between home and work, and while on the bus from town to the office, it shut out the babble of other people, and created a barrier between myself and anyone from work on the bus who may have been inclined to strike up a conversation. And on the way home, the same was also true but listening to music also helped me decompress – or mirror my angst – after a day in a noisy open-plan office. Lockdown changed that. I suddenly felt the need to be alert in case of approaching runners or cyclists or people kicking off in queues for the supermarket because someone wasn’t observing the two-metre rule or otherwise losing the plot over COVID restrictions. In short, I was scared – terrified, even. Not so much of the virus, but other people. I felt I needed to be on high alert at all times, because people are simply so unpredictable. One byproduct of this was that when I left the house form my allotted hour of exercise, I became acutely aware of the quietness – the absence of the thrum of traffic, the absence of chatter, and in their absence, I could instead hear the wind, birdsong, my own footsteps. In fact, I could hear everything. In the quiet, the small sounds were suddenly so much louder. The quiet wasn’t nearly as quiet as it first seemed. It was the aural equivalent of one’s eyes growing adjusted to the dark.

The auditory voyage of discovery Wellman charts on Can You Hear The Streetlights Glow bears clear parallels to my experience, but takes things a step or three further with his use of an array of equipment in order to capture sonic happenings in these spaces and his interrogation of the sounds in order to reach a deeper, more intimate understanding of his environs.

The results are quite fascinating, and range from a cluster of brief snippets, of under a minute and a half to just over two minutes, to more expansive segments – 5G Antenna Power Box is almost five and a half minutes, and ‘Mercury-vapor Lights’ is a full twelve and a half minutes in length. The titles of the pieces are location-specific, and some are quite evocative in themselves – notably ‘Time Depleting on Bird Scooter’ and ‘Gas Pipes Behind Smoothie Shop’. On the one hand, they’re utilitarian in their descriptions; on the other, they create an image of a filmic world in which sound events happen in particular places.

Most of those sound events are different levels of hum and drone, but these varying levels of low-level throbbing serve as reminders of how mankind has interfered with the naturally-occurring sounds which are the true sounds of the outdoors. While I am likely to note the hum of the power lines as I pass a pylon, and so on, I am still attuned to the wind in the trees, the scurry of squirrels. The sounds on Can You Hear The Street Lights Glow are all entirely man-made, mechanical, and despite Wellman’s relocation to a more rural setting facilitating the opening of his ears, the locations are all noteworthy for their constructed, non-natural nature. People may interpret this differently, and Wellman’s intentions may have been different again, but the leading thing I take away from this is just how hard it is to truly escape the mechanised world we’ve made. But equally, Can You Hear The Street Lights Glow is a document which highlights the extent to which even in silence, there is sound – lots of it.

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Nomad Tree – I: Awakening The Ancestors

Posted: 4 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 29th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Creativity can have immensely therapeutic effects. The psychology behind it is likely complex, if it’s even fully understood, but immersing oneself in something creative, be it music, writing, or visual arts seems to uncoil the mind in ways nothing else can quite manage.

With I: Awakening The Ancestors, described as ‘a profound journey through sound, blending experimental folk, noise, and shamanic practices’, Stuart Chalmers, under the moniker of Nomad Tree, presents ‘the culmination of an 18-month exploration from burn-out and self-doubt to discovering a new voice. Using feedback techniques, contact mics on frame/bass drums, amplified dulcimers, gongs, and percussion made from natural materials, the album creates a dark, hypnotic soundscape. Recorded in unique locations like Cathedral Cave and Luds Church, the tracks evoke a sense of ancient connection to the land and spiritual practice. It’s a cathartic release aimed at healing and altered states of consciousness’.

And so it is in Chalmers’ case, perhaps, that the creative process, paired with reconnecting in some way with nature, and with places which inspire a sense of ancient history, a time before religion as it now exists, before civilisation as we know it, even, has provided a sense of escape from the all-pervasive shit of the now.

I: Awakening The Ancestors consists of three longform pieces, each over ten minutes long, and these are compositions laden with dense atmosphere. ‘On Sorcerous Wings Take Flight’ is so dense as to be oppressive: heavy, thunderous percussion rings out across barren moorland and reverberates around thick forests. Winds blow and the very earth moans and mumbles. Darkness creeps ever closer, growing ever heavier. There is a sense of a presence, but, at the same time, the absence of anything which feels overtly human is conspicuous. Although the track’s evocation is ancient mists, my mind takes me to a most contemporary on-line discussion around the hypothetical question ‘If you were alone in the woods, would you rather encounter a bear or a man?’ It’s a talking point around women’s safety, but in the last year I have taken to going on ever-longer walks in a quest to be in nature, but away from people. As Brion Gysin said, ‘man is a bad animal’, and as unnerving as the unknown and the unseeable may be, the prospect of encountering other people is considerably scarier.

‘Seeking Through Deepest Fears’ careens into dark space with droning, melancholic string sounds, wheezing, rumbling, polytonal tension and low, slow-building layers, to which primitive percussion eventually joins. There’s an oddly psychedelic sheen to this piece as it settles into a hypnotic groove overlayed with what sounds like scrawling, scraping walls of feedback, and it lands somewhere between Black Angels and latter-day Swans in terms of the listening experience: intense, almost overwhelming, but also uplifting on account of the complete immersion it engenders.

If the liner notes imply a sense of progression, a narrative arc, or any sort of linearity, the actuality of I: Awakening The Ancestors confounds that expectation in its merciless gloom. With tribal beats bashing away, hard, ‘Amongst Forest Spirits Or Wild Beasts’ conjures a sense of tapping into something elemental. It eventually tapers away to silence amidst a clamour of chimes, leaving a sense of emptiness, and much to reflect on.

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Andrea Janov – Short Skirts and Whiskey Shots: Tales of Nights I Shouldn’t Have Made it Home Alive

Posted: 17 August 2023 in Books
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Earth Island Books – July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Ordinarily, any book reviews published here on Aural Aggravation are music-related – although admittedly, the inclusion of Stewart Home’s most recent outing, Art School Orgy made it here by virtue of being punk in ethos and published by a record label instead of a conventional publisher. It doesn’t pay to be too prescriptive. And so it is with Short Skirts and Whiskey Shots, the collection of poetry by Andrea Janov, which follows Mix Tapes and Photo Albums, described as ‘a coming-of-age poetry collection about a small town punk rock scene’.

Short Skirts and Whiskey Shots is pitched as a book which ‘captures that liminal part of our lives, that time past adolescence, yet before adulthood.’ It’s not really a book about music. In fact, it’s not remotely a book about music. It’s a book about New York, and a book about finding yourself while being lost in a lifestyle. Yet at the same time, music is there, in the background.

Although the visual formatting and typography (set in a very small font – presumably to maintain the shape of the lines and verses on the pages rather than for cost in this instance) is poetical, the pieces themselves are simple, straightforward prose narrative, and the 24 pieces which make up ‘A Fifth Floor Walk-In’ provide a neat linear scene-setting, sketching succinctly sights and sounds, people and places. The brush strokes are broad, with just the most cursory of details fleshing things out. The titles in this first section are all locations (if ‘7B’ feels rather tenuous compared to ‘10th Street and Avenue B’, we learn later that it’s a bar that plays punk rock), and this theme is continued, albeit less strictly, throughout the book. You couldn’t call it psychogeography, but it does serve to pin each reflection to a place, and sometimes a time, too, and in doing to explores the nature of memory and how places become evocative of moments in time, however fleeting, which reverberate in our recollections further down the line.

Amidst the array of sights, sounds, smells, and the general ambience of chatter and bustling subways, the weather is a prominent and recurring feature of these poems. While we British have a global reputation for our obsession with the weather, it equally seems to be an American thing, particularly when it comes to New York: Ed McBain’s novels always place great emphasis on the heat or the cold or the rain, a s from these readings it does seem as if NY has its own quite specific climate conditions which are an integral part of the experience of life in the city. In these early pieces, she captures the contradictory sense of community – or perhaps scene – and isolation, the distance that comes from living in such densely-packed proximity where people avoid eye contact and rarely even meet their neighbours, let alone reach speaking terms (‘NY, NY’).

As the book progresses, so the pace quickens and the details become less sharply defined, as long shifts in clubs and after-shift drinks melt onto an overall sensation of perpetual movement rather than specifics, and if the backdrop references to punk rock and the Beats on the surface feel somewhat cliché, given that Janov is recounting life in her early 20s finding herself in New York, it’s wholly credible, because it’s simply how it goes: these are the gateways to all things ‘alternative’, a rite of passage, almost. While few here in England use the term ‘punk rock’, its broad meaning in American parlance means it has a universal understanding of music that exists outside of the mainstream. Only a handful of bands are mentioned by name, and if anything, this vagueness imbues the writing with a greater relatability because it ‘despecifies’ and thus broadens the scope for understanding that general musical backdrop.

There are darker moments which remind us of the reason for the book’s subtitle, as in ‘Twenty First and Sixth Avenue, Please’ (the formatting I’m unable to replicate here)

Wake up / Suffocated by the sun / Disoriented and groggy / Chin throbbing / Hand caked in blood

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Stand up. / One shoe on. / Sock in my pocket. / Grope around for other injuries. / No other spot of pain. / No cuts or bruises or contusions. / The chin probably needs stitches. / A skull and crossbones bandage will have to do.

There’s nothing dewy-eyed – and perhaps more significantly and more appealing, nothing dramatic about her narrations of living a life without fear simply because being young and immersed in living life, the risks of walking home through parks at 3am blurry with booze simply weren’t a factor for consideration.

There are a number of scenes and recollections which are replayed in only subtly different ways throughout the collection, but the repetition, rather than being frustrating, recreates the experience of lived memory, how things echo back at us variously, how our minds will return to certain times, certain places.

There’s a melancholy intermingled with fond nostalgia in ‘The East Village’, where on returning she reflects on the process of gentrification: the way the few places which remain have changed.

The sequencing of the poems does have a clear overarching linearity: first, the buzz of arriving and discovering New York, followed by the relentless whirlwind of life, before winding down to a more reflective place on revisiting and remembering. It makes for a short but satisfying work.

(Click on image for link to purchase)

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Steve Roden – Oionos

Posted: 17 January 2022 in Albums
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Room40 – 14th January 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

One of the many wonderful things about music is that it has no limits, and no constraints. There is music to be found in anything and everything, and music can be made my anyone, anywhere, anytime, with anything, or even nothing. Steve Roden’s choice of instrumentation on Oionos is noteworthy for being quite unconventional, as he explains: ‘The audio was built from field recordings and small “poor” objects such as tin whistles, toy harmonicas, and the like. These “instruments” suggested by the museum of musical instruments in Athens, where the proper instruments take up most of the museum, but there is a wonderful display case in the basement with musical toys, religious objects, and other sounding devices not considered musical instruments.’ These instruments and objects combine to conjure a magical, mystical soundscape with overtly musical sounds contrasting with less overtly musical sounds and woven together to create something that occupies a unique sonic space.

In popular western culture, we’ve come to understand only the narrowest of definitions of music, which for many is represented by an album consisting of a number of ‘songs’, bite-size pierces which are tightly structured and subject to conforming to certain parameters, including rhythm, and suchlike. Even many ambient works, which delineate many of those mainstream conventions, are created within limitations; these are compositional factors, imposed by the creators, rather than being significant of true musical limits.

With Oionos, Steve Roden frees the music, presenting a single, continuous piece with a running time of one hour, one minute, and fifty-five seconds. Time was when the CD format placed a time constraint of seventy-two minutes on a release, but technology has evolved, and the duration of this piece feels entirely natural, as if the music has run its course to a satisfying conclusion by the close.

The composition is, in many respects less concerned with time, than with place. As Roden writes on the album ‘Oionos was created for the exhibition The Grand Promenade, in Athens, Greece. The exhibition took place in various archaeological and historical sites in central Athens, creating a situation for contemporary site specific works to be in dialogue with their historical surroundings.’

Although the location was integral to the album’s inspiration, it’s less integral to the listening experience when taken out of the context, and the music featured is, if not necessarily ambient in the most conventional sense, it is very much abstract, and also very much background sounds rather than music one actively listens to. But zoning in and out is a pleasurable experience, which perhaps serves to highlight the multifaceted nature of the sounds. Metallophone-like notes chime and ring, seemingly with an almost random notations and the loosest of rhythms, against a backdrop of scrapes and drones, while sounds like wind gusts and lapping water fill the space in the background. While the different elements conglomerate throughout, by half-listening, one finds oneself becoming aware of them individually at different times, and you find yourself experiencing the recording differently at different times as you tune into and become aware of the different sounds, textures, and tones.

As a whole, Oionos feels like something living and breathing, as if the sounds in combination have taken on a life of their own – and in many senses, they have, and they merge together to form a shifting, pulsating whole. It’s unfamiliar, but not eerie despite its otherness; there is a certain calm that radiates throughout the duration.

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