June 26, 2015

Duct tape

Quick post. I should do more quick posts. There's been a half-finished second epic on Uneasy Landscape Listening sitting on my desktop for some months. So in other, strictly in-door music, here's a link to the promo clip for a favorite record right now, Three Exercises by Devin DiSanto and Nick Hoffman on Erstwhile.


Recorded in an elementary school, using the process of creation both as fictional narrative and structural device for the music ... the photos show the venue rigged up for the making of sounds, with numbered pieces of evidence from an elaborately cued lab experiment arranged geometrically on the floor. It's all a set-up: silly school science project, serious mapping of spaces, rules made up because they look good, rules followed by good kids ... I'm sure I've never heard a record with so many different attitudes toward sounds, or with sounds meant so differently. Depending on where in the narrative they sit, if they're music, test work, exploration, exposition, or frame story. Some sounds are dead funny (the actual entrance of the duct tape the voices speak about in the clip). Some come in scare quotes.