“I can live at sea! The sea forgives all! Unlike those mean old mountains. I hate them so much”. I wonder how many albums on Touch Homer Simpson had heard before he came to that ever-so-slightly life-changing conclusion. Very few, I suspect. A number of releases on Touch have had maritime themes, including BJ Nilsen’s The Short Night and Fennesz’s The Black Sea, although most celebrated may be the field recordings (if you can call under the sea a “field”) of Chris Watson. These records are fascinating explorations of the mysteries of the ocean, but leave you with a distinctly unsettled feeling, unsure about what exactly you’ve just heard, but in no doubt about the sea’s awesome dark power. To this collection of releases we can now add Jana Winderen’s Energy Field.
Jana Winderen possesses an interesting CV which lends her perfectly to this piece of work. An artist with a background in fish ecology (as well as maths and chemistry) who has been responsible for a number of light and sound-based installations on nautical subjects, Winderen appears to have an incredible understanding of how to capture and present the unknowable, the world beneath the ocean’s surface. So strange is this place that if you didn’t know anything about how this was recorded (in the seas around Norway, Russia and Greenland) you’d struggle to place the sounds. In fact, it isn’t easy even if you DO know. “Aquaculture” has a booming pulse, a deep lowing which sounds almost choral. Is it a distant boat? A huge whale? What about that horrifying roar: is it thunder or a piece of the ice shelf collapsing into the sea? The extraordinary creaks of “Isolation/Measurement”: are they old boat doors, or dolphin chatter? “Sense Of Latent Power” is full of sparks and clicks which sound almost like a fire ripping through dry wood at first, but which might be more explicable as a melting glacier. These sounds are fascinating in themselves, but they are layered up to powerful and almost musical effect, deep drones and high frequency pulsations interspersed with this narrative of unfathomable events, building to a rather frightening climax. Energy Field is an excellent record which is full of dark secrets, and in which occasional complete immersion is highly recommended. I’m not sure I’d want to live there though, Homer.
Listen to a sample of Energy Field from the Touch website. If you buy the CD from the Touch shop you get a bonus 27 minute-long mp3 recording of Jana performing in Den Haag.
Recent Comments