Dutch sound artist and Machinefabriek collaborator Wouter van Veldhoven has maintained quite a low profile since he began releasing music in 2005, quietly assembling a unique body of work with a minimum of fanfare or self-promotion. Fortunately, someone at Mort Aux Vaches noticed anyway and invited Wouter to drop by the studio with his arsenal of decrepit reel-to-reel tape players and home-built equipment for a live session of wobbly, understated ambient beauty.
The 35-minute set consists of three pieces, all of which are untitled. The opening work is a fragile, hazy edifice built from what sounds like several decayed tape loops of a melodica (or perhaps an accordion). It is relatively sparse and one-dimensional, but manages to work anyway, simply because it is so sad and tremulous. The central elements of Wouter’s aesthetic seem to be spaciousness, simplicity, and deliberate frailty. Rather than layering his loops to create density and complicated interactions and harmonies, he instead allows his work to unfold teasingly slowly and woozily, as if there is a good chance that the entire thing may collapse at any second or that the next note might never come.
The second track, while significantly longer, does not tamper much with van Veldhoven’s formula. However, the mood takes a more ominous turn, as somber chords insistently swell up from the crack and hiss of the tape while quivering higher pitches form a disquieting impressionist fog above it all. Soon a strange delayed rustling begins to flap through the murky sonic landscape at predictable intervals like a giant mechanical bird, and a host of non-musical flutters and throbs begins to intensify before it all fades slowly away.
The epic (nearly 20-minute) closer that follows it is the most engrossing and emotionally affecting distillation of van Veldhoven’s vision on the album. Again, however, there is no real dramatic change in what he does. Instead, Wouter merely allows himself more time to weave his teetering, quavering sound web. The instrumentation changes a bit though—I definitely hear a guitar and a xylophone this time around. They are not played at all conventionally, however, but are merely sound sources for a drifting and diffuse cloud of blurred notes. About halfway through, the now deceptively complex fog becomes bolstered by shimmering cymbals and the looped melancholy sighing of a human voice. The voice soon begins to overlap itself and unexpectedly coheres into a hypnotic, immersive, and heavenly mantra that sounds as divinely inspired as any Gregorian chant.
Mort Aux Vaches has captured an impressive and inspired performance. This is not necessarily a great or essential stand-alone work due to its brevity and sketch-like nature (brilliant closing piece aside), but it does have the important distinction of being my first exposure to van Veldhoven and it was an extremely favorable one. I am very eager to hear what Wouter can do when he has no time and equipment constraints limiting him: it seems like he has no trouble at all assembling the base elements for works of sublime beauty, but merely needs a sufficient amount of time to bring them to full flower.
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