They Were Dreaming They Were Stones can't be considered apurist's field recording composition, as Murmer's Patrick McGinley doesincorporate "operated" devices like a car seat massager and telephonefeedback/ringtone; however the majority of the five-part piece wasgathered from locations as idiosyncratic and rich with colorfulassociations as the resulting music. McGinley takes sound from elevatorshafts, airplane cabins, a Turkish football victory celebration,Hewlitt's Cove Marina in Massachusetts and the Brooklyn Bridge amongother disparate spots, transforming them into a diverse current ofnoise dominated by thin drones and loose textural scatter, never busyand nicely blended. The artist seems more interested in creating musicwith its own private momentum and internal reference points thaninstigating the kind of environmental illusionism or detail-oriented,"investigative" technique common to the field medium. Even afterreading the liner notes and discovering the origins of McGinley'srecordings, it remains near-impossible to pin certain sounds onparticular sources to the exclusion of all others. When, at the end of Stones'"Prologue," traffic sounds from the Brooklyn Bridge begin to interruptthe shrill tones of telephone(!) feedback, the cars are far fromdisruptive, hardly cars at all and more suggestive of the low rumblesthat come from the 600-gallon steel watertank that appears in "PartFour." The creaking wood and chiming mast sounds from the marina in"Part Three" only reveal themselves when thrown into relief against thevacuous thudding of the elevator shaft, which could itself be thewatertank or part of the airplane's ghostly interior. Through carefultiming and expert fades, McGinley manages these discrepancies withoutmaking the resulting confusion the focus of the piece. The artistmatches the rhythmic and tonal structures of his individual segments,splicing them together so that points of flux do not emerge arbitrarilywith the chance swells of a particular component but at calculated andanticipated moments in the whole. Recognizable melodic turns, viaringtones presumably, reappear throughout several parts, reinforcingthe involved, almost symphonic character of Stones. Only once,during the piece's first part does McGinley run into trouble. Thecyclical rhythm of an old gas meter in his basement provides thedominant noise during this part, and the artist could've tried harderto submerge the meter in the surrounding atmospherics, as the rhythm,while appealing, stands out as too forced or persuasive an elementwithin the otherwise sublime, organic progression. McGinley recoverswith the longer, climactic "Part Four," which (somehow) drives theaforementioned watertank and cabin ambience into a heavenly chorus ofdroning activity, almost Eno-esque in its resounding warmth.Read More
