#audiobulb

Opera singer Alice DeVille is XII Sound, a change of pace for the singer-composer that allows her to face her fears head-on.  Growing up next to Wimbleton Station, she was comforted by the sounds of the train: the soothing rhythms of clack and conversation.  But as an adult, “something changed, and I began to experience an increasing dread of the tube. Something about the very shape of it – the…

We almost never publish a review a month before its release (this may be the first time), but we do have a good reason: The Long Night in Winter Light is a cold winter album, better suited for February chill than for March thaw.  I’ve been listening in front of a fireplace while the outside temperature has dropped to a single degree Fahrenheit and the winds have increased to 50 mph.  The music is…

Jimmy Behan ~ Here We Are Now

If the pandemic prompted some people to reach for their duvet and binge Tiger King, then it also sparked a creative burst in others. Take up knitting, finish that novel, write that album, and so on. We’ve observed the phenomenon of ‘lockdown albums’ for many months now, with musicians producing work at home and releasing it via independent channels. Here We Are Now is Jimmy Behan’s first album…

Moss Covered Technology ~ Slow Walking / Wil Bolton ~ Kochi

Since art exists in time, it is unthinkable that it be separate from space. As we become absorbed in the duration of a record, a new space is imagined – or relations with our environment are infinitesimally altered. To some, ambient music may seem a kind of background texture devoid of action. But explorations of duration and location give it a distinctly narrative structure. It tells stories, in…

The cover image contains paint, but it’s not a painting; it’s the scraped paint left by cars confronting a concrete post.  The surrealistic swirl extends to the music as well. Territory may contain field recordings, but it’s not a field recording album; it’s the electronic impression created by Nonturn as he scraps sonic flecks and pieces from the streets of Tokyo.

Over a period of several years,…

Jacek Doroszenko: Soundreaming (Audiobulb)

Jacek Doroszenko has worked as one half of Mammoth Ulthana, and Soundreaming marks his first release as a solo artist. As its title suggests, the album weaves a fantastical sprawl of sound design that feels often dreamlike in its weird juxtapositions and contrasts. Doroszenko's goal with Soundreaming is to treat sound as a manipulatable palette much in the way that photography or visual art can abstract and alter perceptions of its origins. “Aberrationmaker” starts the album off in a dreamy fashion, but it's a red herring of sorts. While it may emphasize preconceptions of what “dreaming” sounds like relative to the album name, this is a far more out-there affair than those pastoral prolonged tones would initially suggest. Chirping birds and field recordings creep to the surface with more subtle manipulation, but the subsequent nine tracks veer into more dizzying explorations. Soundreaming was produced through Doroszenko's residency at Hangar in Barcelona, wherein Doroszenko aims to use soundscapes to replace photography as the main documentary element of his craft. With its sometimes overt nods to source material and obfuscations elsewhere, Soundreaming presents environmental sound as a means of shaping perception and letting its audience bring their own interpretations to the table. “Gothic Passage” layers tinkering acoustic sounds over looping and reversed music recordings and tiny bells, while “Fiestamachine” feels like a skipping gramophone, a jaunty piano ditty betrayed by sweeping orchestral arrangements in the background, sort of an otherworldly oompah.

Soundreaming by Jacek Doroszenko

In “MACBA Skaters,” Doroszenko presumably captures the contact sounds of skaters in front of the Museum for Art Contemporary Barcelona, a popular hangout for skaters in the city. The location and source are not always so clear; “Passion Passion” is a swirl of disembodied handclaps, guitar strums, and human voice that build to a dizzying climax, an almost full tilt wall of sound. Doroszenko is wise in his sequencing of these pieces of sound art, with “Silent Souvenirs” and “Gone and Faded” providing some respite after their frenetic predecessor. The latter is the longest piece on the album, and it seems to suggest the very nature of how ephemeral associations of time and place can be after the fact. By the time its drones are distilled into repetitive, tiny sequences, I've lost track of whatever assumptions I may have brought to the track in the first place. The remaining tracks continue to push the envelope as far as source manipulations go, with “Urban Folk” working as a percolating bubbler of sound that in some ways mirrors the hard-drive chatter implied by closer “HDD Ensemble.” The typographic and photographic manipulations that accompany the project and its wonderful online supplement feel like the natural complement, with its sources highly distorted and manipulated into fascinating abstractions of their own. Ultimately, whatever dreams Soundreaming conjures up in the minds of its listeners will be equal parts the result of the sound itself and the perceptions, memory, and assumptions of those listeners, and that's really at the core of what sound art is all about. I find it an engaging and wonderfully strange set of sounds from start to finish. Recommended.