As Frans remarked in these pages some weeks ago, reviewing a compilation tends to be a difficult task, as it usually forces you to keep your statements pretty general or to pick out some contributions while neglecting the rest. This compilation doesn’t make a difference in that and so it leaves me writing about the concept first. The photographic work of TJ Norris, who curated this compilation, focuses on textures and structures that he finds in the uninhabited, industrial areas of big cities, like abandoned buildings or train- and shipyards. The photographs present a highly aestheticised view on these motives, abstracting them and partly combining them with ‘post-minimal’ painting or sculpture. A selection of TJ Norris’ works, plus some installation views from his exhibitions is featured on the DVD. And while this might not be enough to decide if he is successful in “culling what he calls ‘evidence’ of the urban environment”, as it reads in the liner notes, it is certainly nice to get an idea of what his work is up to. In the development of some of his recent work Norris collaborated with a series of international sound artists. He asked them to compose ‘soundtracks’ to act as basic sensory inspiration while taking photographs out in the streets. These tracks were then given to yet another set of musicians, who reworked the material. The results became an intrinsic part of TJ Norris’ installations and are now collected on the compilation reviewed here. It’s an impressive array of people involved, and I cannot name them all, so it’s best to visit the label’s website for a full list of participants.
The great strength of this compilation lies in the fact that, with minor exceptions, all the music perfectly makes sense in conjunction with Norris’ visual work. It’s not a relationship of mutual illustration, but it’s obvious that people working in different media are interested in similar phenomena and aesthetic parameters. So, while being far from homogenous in its approach or the atmosphere it evokes, most of the music focuses on abstract textures, clearly digital in nature, often subdued and highly minimal. There are, however, also a couple of contributions dealing with guitar-drones, minimal beats, and lively cut-ups.
As with every compilation, some tracks stick out, according to personal taste and interests. For me that is above all the contribution from Richard Francis, who reworks material by Humectant Interruption. I admire the LP “Technologies of Sleep” and the 7″ “Two Ways” which he released several years ago under the name of Eso Steel, and I was delighted to fin d that, although his sound has changed and he has abandoned working with reel-to-reel-recorders in favor of a computer these days, his track presents a very convincing update of the aesthetic sensibilities that make the aforementioned releases so fascinating to me. Similar things could be said about Troum’s track, in which they rework material from all the other contributions. And finally Nobukazu Takemura does a fine job with his subtly fragmentized sounds that move about gently.
Although I’ve heard stronger material from some of the other people involved here, it is overall a fine showcase of current tendencies in the field of digital experiments with sounds and textures. I already mentioned the DVD-part of this compilation, and it does not only contain an overview of TJ Norris’ art, but also four videos with music by Beequeen, Asmus Tietchens, Scanner and Matthew Adkins. This is interesting, because these are some of the original tracks that got reworked for the audio-part of the compilation. But first of all it adds another facet to the sensibilities explored by the other contributions. Here it is the collaboration between Sue Costabile (video) and Beequeen (sound) that succeeds best, with reduced flickering patterns that dwell in a fragile state of abstraction and beautifully match Beequeen’s warm and dreamy sound, while the piece by Miles Chalcraft (video) and Matthew Adkins (sound) with its mixture of breakbeats, film footage from Berlin and videogame brutalities seems all too obvious and didn’t do much for me.
– MSS, Vital Weekly
