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Listening to Alva Noto’s new record For gives me the feeling I used to get as a child when I walked past a sub-station; the electrical crackle and hum filling me with a sense of awe and foreboding. Tracks like “Transit” and “Gulf Night” are so charged with static that they make my hair stand on end, and make me want to run a lightning conductor up my trouser leg.
I wonder to what extent my fear of these places is due to those public information broadcasts which featured people hoofing footballs into them, scampering over the high fence to retrieve them with inevitably faintly comic tragic consequences. And why did they stop showing these commercials? Are sub-stations much safer than they used to be? Do we use a different “safe” type of electricity now? What about pylons? I reckon people still throw Frisbees in their vicinity.
Incidentally , I digress from this digression – have you noticed how there appears to be a classic UK pylon design, but in other countries, they shun this design in favour of something even more alien-looking or asymmetric? Does each country employ a different pylon designer (and if so, what does that career involve once they have created the basic pylon template)?
Come to think of it I don’t remember having seen a really good sub-station recently; one in the classic open-air format - I have seen enclosed ones, but they don’t scare me, despite the man on the yellow sign attached to the door getting really fucked over by a giant arrow.
Back to For. I am safely earthed later in the album by the ringing melodies of “Jr” and the lethargic twinkling of “Odradek”, the latter in particular bringing to mind the languid mood of the extended drum-free pieces on Neu! or early Kraftwerk records. Last track “Z1” threatens to boot my football back over the fence, but crafty employment of piano over a carpet of barely audible clicks and beeps remind me of some of Alva Noto’s magnificent collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, and I remember that I don’t like playing football so much anyway. Interestingly, all pieces are dedications of some sort (for example, to photographer Jeff Wall, to Coil’s Jhonn Balance, to John Cage, to, erm, Ernie and Bert).
The Chartier/Deupree piece, recorded for an exhibition of seascape photography, is a different beast altogether. The first section is like a musical interpretation of the equation y=x/15, in the way it rises almost imperceptibly from nothing over its quarter of an hour. It takes around six minutes for me to register any recorded sound over the mundane hubbub of everyday life. Sine waves surface periodically out of a sea of electronic chatter, before all is becalmed again. The tide comes back in in the closing half, with increasingly pure metallic tones rising over the intense humming of an underwater electronic monastery (no, I probably didn’t think that one through).
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