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Loren Chasse
The Air In The Sand
Naturestrip CD
Available through the Helen Scarsdale Agency: $16.00
The San Francisco based sound artist Loren Chasse is apt
to describe the many facets of his work through a simple
metaphor. For example, Chasse often qualifies his microphone
as a physical extension of the ear, and site-specific
environments become his ersatz studio and mixing board.
Yet these metaphors extend far beyond the concept of sound
construction and into sympathetic relationships with everything
around him. On his critically acclaimed 2002 album Hedge
of Nerves, he applied the often fetishized sound of
vinyl crackle to elemental recordings of wind, sand, fire,
wood, and surf for an album bristling with tactility whose
complex details amassed into an transcendent, oceanic
blur. This was not a mimesis of an antiquated technology
dumped upon a digital production with the facade of "making
something real," but an abstracted coupling of complementary
acoustics hopefully to engage the imagination of the audience.
For his most recent album The Air In The Sand,
Chasse posits another metaphor: the composition as a diorama.
Within his ideas about the sound diorama, Chasse exaggerates
those sounds which he feels to be essential for a space
and minimizes everything else. Again, the recording process
of The Air In The Sand revolves around Chasse's
active participation within a particular environment.
In these unspecified spaces, he broadcasts an array of
drones, textures, and field recordings back into the sonic
environment where they intermingle with the ambience of
that location. Part of this process is an attempt to move
away from the constraints of the digital workstation;
but at the same time, Chasse is far more interested in
the curious alchemy that occurs when a space listens to
itself making sound. The nighttime chorus of crickets
gurgles within aqueous percolations and the tectonic crash
of surf crashing against rock. Elsewhere, rain vaporizes
in a caustic sizzle as it falls upon overhead electrical
wires, and this sound is compounded by the sharp crack
of branches and the slow hiss of sand. For all of the
elemental sounds that dominate his recordings, Chasse
extracts subtle musical timbres and fragile half-melodies
that haunt The Air In The Sand.
While some of Chasse's recording techniques remain similar,
it is important to note that Chasse sets this body of
work (along with id battery and Coelacanth) outside of
his ongoing pastoral contributions to the polyphonic Jewelled
Antler constellation (e.g. Thuja, The Blithe Sons, Child
Readers, and even his pseudonymous solo project Of.) With
an emphasis placed upon location and its sonic ghosts,
Chasse exposes something profoundly beautiful lurking
in the shadows of the landscape.
"once, at the base of an escarpment by the sea,
i stepped between two great rocks and beheld a white dish
set upon a rusted disc on the ground.
inside this dish...sand, pebbles, bits of shell, sea-glass
and twigs
(all the fleeting materials of the shore, really)
had been arranged in miniature replica of the landscape.
the path planks i had come in on, leading down from the
dunes,
even the driftwood shelter where i had crouched and had
my lunch,
were recreated here in carefully snipped and measured
pieces.
a fleck of something in the tiny grasses sparkled momentarily
and then a shadow from a cloud caused the whole place
to dim.
imaginably, it is in such a diorama that i have all along
been listening." -- l.chasse |
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