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Michael Gendreau, "55 Pas De La Lingne Au No.3"
This record is nothing if not meditative.
23five
While pushing the normally suppressed and inaudible whirs and clicks of the mechanical innards of your favorite turntable into the foreground, Michael Gendreau has curiously pushed the attention on the actual sound output of his recording to the back. My zen-like state of concentration aside, it was virtually impossible for me to listen to the opening piece (one of two long tracks that makes up the album) without wondering where the sounds came from, how they were recorded, and what this all said about listening to the playback device instead of the playback. The use of a turntable to produce sounds other than those reproduced from a vinyl record is far from novel, but Gendreau spends a full 16:18 trying to beat the idea of these hidden sounds into our head. A constant drone that could be the inside of the tone arm amplified to a low roar, reminded me a great deal of the results of a naive experiment I once conducted by placing a microphone in front of a fan and letting it record for half an hour. It's interesting for about two minutes, then you realize that your ears have intentionally filtered this kind of sound out all of your life for a reason: it's boring. The second (and longer) of the two pieces finds Gendreau more actively affecting the results of his micro-scale recordings. Clocking in at 35:45, it's still not a piece for anyone deeply engaged in the Nintendo Generation, and the piece could easily be broken into smaller, more digestible segments. Structurally, it works like listening to a record as the record player's various internal sound quirks are explored episodically like grooves in a record that isn't there. The absent needle and wax are referenced in the way the track picks up an idea, exploits a sound or natural rhythm for a while, then drops the idea and skips onto the next. After nearly an hour of listening for the compositional touch that Gendreau added to make these more than simple field recordings, I came to realize that maybe the music was not, in itself, the point. The only question that remains for me is this: why wasn't this released on vinyl?
While pushing the normally suppressed and inaudible whirs and clicks of the mechanical innards of your favorite turntable into the foreground, Michael Gendreau has curiously pushed the attention on the actual sound output of his recording to the back. My zen-like state of concentration aside, it was virtually impossible for me to listen to the opening piece (one of two long tracks that makes up the album) without wondering where the sounds came from, how they were recorded, and what this all said about listening to the playback device instead of the playback. The use of a turntable to produce sounds other than those reproduced from a vinyl record is far from novel, but Gendreau spends a full 16:18 trying to beat the idea of these hidden sounds into our head. A constant drone that could be the inside of the tone arm amplified to a low roar, reminded me a great deal of the results of a naive experiment I once conducted by placing a microphone in front of a fan and letting it record for half an hour. It's interesting for about two minutes, then you realize that your ears have intentionally filtered this kind of sound out all of your life for a reason: it's boring. The second (and longer) of the two pieces finds Gendreau more actively affecting the results of his micro-scale recordings. Clocking in at 35:45, it's still not a piece for anyone deeply engaged in the Nintendo Generation, and the piece could easily be broken into smaller, more digestible segments. Structurally, it works like listening to a record as the record player's various internal sound quirks are explored episodically like grooves in a record that isn't there. The absent needle and wax are referenced in the way the track picks up an idea, exploits a sound or natural rhythm for a while, then drops the idea and skips onto the next. After nearly an hour of listening for the compositional touch that Gendreau added to make these more than simple field recordings, I came to realize that maybe the music was not, in itself, the point. The only question that remains for me is this: why wasn't this released on vinyl? samples:
