Hampson's soundsignature is unmistakable, although he's recently shifted the focus ofhis source material from guitar noise to environmental recordings anddeeper electroacoustic influences. 'Hysteresis' opens with a bigechoing clunk. Meticulously deployed gurgles, ringings and rustles allcompliment each other, looming violently, rising to crescendos andfading eerily. It's a much faster evolving track than his latter"Firmament" installments and makes the compilation essential!
Inventor of the tri-phonic turntable Janek Schaefer has recently beencollaborating with Robert in Comae, and his opening track shifts down agear from his dense "Above Buildings" album for Fat Cat. 'LithosphericShifts' slowly fades in with a rumble like muffled motors buried inconcrete, and soon the concrete starts to crack. Christophe Charles is a French sound artist living in Tokyo who helpedMarkus Popp make Oval's "Dok". His 'Undirected Float' seems very warmand womblike after the spikier soundscapes of the Londoners. Voices aremuffled by the protective blood and fat of dreamlike ambience. Similarsounds appear to those on his Yoshihiro Hanno remix, so maybe this is akind of companion piece? Former Ultra Vivid Scene lynchpin Kurt Ralske closes the disc withperhaps the easiest going track, a beautiful sunrise tide of smoothwaves of processed singing and guitar washing in and out that's a niceway to drift away. Nam June Paik collaborator Stephen Vitiello's 'Salty Lemonade forFalling Water' might be considered literally womblike, includingrecordings of his daughter's prenatal vital signs, but it's perhaps themost disorientating recording here. Oddly dislocated traffic noise andmachine clatter merge into a nightmarish grey drone sliced by bottletop twisting tones, but then again maybe that's what it sounds like insome wombs? These recordings were made at the Whitney Museum in the oldWorld Trade Center, which adds an unintended grim twist to the title ofthe compilation - a floating foundation on which the Imperial Hotelstood was given by it's architect as the reason it didn't topple in a1922 earthquake. The compiler's intention was to use this as a metaphorfor 'decompartmentalisation of genre' in music and sound art. Thisseems to be a slightly pretentious, but educational, way of saying thatthey made an effort to put together a compilation that hangs togetherwell!
- Main - Hysterersis
- Stephen Vitiello - Salty Lemonade for Falling Water
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