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HMS009
Jim Haynes
Telegraphy By The Sea
CD
Release Date: September 26, 2006
Out of print.
"I prefer to abstract recorded sounds to the point
that I can't remember how I made them," says rust-tinged
artist Jim Haynes. "This way I can't go back and
reverse engineer anything." The source material for
Telegraphy by the Sea spans four years and several
continents. During the time between conception and completion,
Mr. Haynes perfected fragments of the album in numerous
contexts, including an exhibition in Melbourne, Australia,
a marathon six-hour performance at the Diapason Gallery
in New York City, and a fortuitous encounter with a rainy
stairwell. Mr. Haynes submitted an early version of the
album to sound artist Giancarlo Toniutti, who provided
caustically constructive -- yet graciously enthusiastic
-- criticism, sending him back to toil away in the depths
of his sonic workshop for two more years before emerging,
blinking in the harsh light of day and drastically higher
gas prices, with the finished product clutched in his
battered, grime-stained hands.
As a result of this process, Mr. Haynes has forged a breathtaking
album of mangled field recordings and droning techniques
perched at the allegorical intersection of electromagnetic
landscapes and meteorological phenomena. Here, it is not
uncommon to find exasperated blasts of air bellowing in
harmony with a swarm of mechanical locusts and a tumbling
landslide of jagged rock. Yet Mr. Haynes grounds the bulk
of the album in a dynamic play of sinusoidal drones. At
times, these timbral flutterings waver into asymmetrical
smears of holy-minimalist splendor; at others, monolithic
grey slabs of drone collapse upon themselves into turbulent
oceanic currents. If comparisons must be made, perhaps
Telegraphy By The Sea parallels William Basinski
at his most fortified or The Hafler Trio at his least
arcane.
Mr. Haynes is a San Francisco-based artist, who describes
his work by simply stating: "I rust things."
He has exhibited his work internationally and collaborated
on four recorded documents with Loren Chasse as Coelacanth.
He is one of the conspirators behind The Sleeping Moustache
(alongside M.S. Waldron, Steven Stapleton, Sigtryggur
Berg Sigmarsson, and R.K. Faulhaber) as well as a contributing
writer to The Wire. This is his second solo endeavor for
The Helen Scarsdale Agency.
Telegraphy By The Sea sports Mr. Haynes' own handsomely
hand-printed letterpress & silkscreen artwork in a
meager edition of 500 copies. -- Helen Scarsdale
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