Room 40 was the name given to the old Navy cryptological unit in World War 1, charged with turning the fragments of sound picked up from German warships into something that made sense. The artists on the Room 40 label do, er, likewise, taking some noises that many would consider unpromising at best, and turning them into something much more listenable. These two latest releases are a case in point: Marina Rosenfeld’s Plastic Materials (from late 2009) and the new album from Eric La Casa, which has the somewhat cumbersome title of Zone Sensible 2 / Dundee 2.
Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and artist from New York who has collaborated with Ikue Mori, Kim Gordon, Philip Jeck, Nels Cline, Alan Licht and loads of other such luminaries. And she belongs in such company, for Plastic Materials really is a superb piece of work. The record is partly based on an earlier Rosenfeld work, her version of Ligeti’s Lontano, scored for teenage choir. Vocal samples from this drift across Rosenfeld’s turntables where they mingle with her own electroacoustic composition. The end result is a delightful, and very playful melange, with girls giggling and chattering over an background of ringing, pulsing electronics and treated piano. The sounds and textures are experimental yet precise, with the distant piano loops of “In F” recalling Basinski, and the glitchy, scarred “Sweetest Sensation” reminding me of Machinefabriek. When combined with the cut up vocals, the closest relative is perhaps AGF, although to the best of my knowledge no AGF record has employed some teenagers to sing R&B like they do on “I Treated Myself…Like I Knew I Would“. Marina Rosenfeld pulls all this source material together like a dream, a most enjoyable dream.
As you can tell from the title, the Eric La Casa disc features two distinct sections. Each is composed of sounds from one of two site-specific recordings, one made in Paris, and one in the Paris of the North: erm, Dundee. The first is all about bees. Bees seem to be a recurring theme in some of the music I’ve been listening to recently, from BJ Nilsen’s Invisible City, to Marcus Davidson’s Bee Symphony. And, listening to this, you can hear why these creatures are in such demand by those with a strong interest in the qualities of sound itself. The second half of the piece “Zone Sensible 2″ features layers of overlapping bee-sourced frequencies, focusing in in such detail that you feel like you could be riding on the back of one of them. They sound like bees, obviously, but at times they sound like helicopters, and eventually they sound like tiny little oscillators. From within the chaos of the hive there comes order, the sounds gradually forming into pure sine waves by the end of “Do You Speak Bees?“. The Dundee pieces are less structured, being a musique concrete collage of sounds found on the streets of that fair(ish) city. There definitely seems to be an urge to capture large spaces used by people, as opposed to the prettier aspects of the city; it can seem a little threatening at times – although I must confess that I found the sound of someone in a car park with a microphone being challenged by a hostile attendant most amusing (“What are you doing in the car park?” “Errrrrr…I’m recording space”). Being an ex-resident from the north east of Scotland, I used to watch football matches in Dens Park and Tannadice quite regularly, so I’m particularly pleased to hear that one of the places La Casa choose to take his microphone was to the “fitba”. I never went to the bingo though, yet the most moving moment of the piece is hearing the doleful calling of numbers in the hall fading into soft church organ and choral tones. The second half of this “side” knits the recordings into a dark and oppressive drone piece which is unlikely to convince anyone of Dundee’s charms. Other then sound artists armed with microphones.
These latest communications can be intercepted over at the enigmatic Room40.
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