I once saw Mark So give a surreal lecture about his music over a carefully placed tapestry of sounds provided by tape recorders spread throughout the room. Each tape recorder contained intermittent snippets of field recordings that were preceded and followed by silences, but given the lo-fi mid-80s answering-machine quality of the recorders that So was using, true silence was never really achieved. Instead, an interesting dichotomy occurred between the white noise of the tape hiss and the organic white noise of the environments that So recorded. So’s “sitting and listening” on his collaborative split with Patrick Farmer is seemingly a recorded version of this piece that subtly juxtaposes the noise of So’s equipment with the ambiance of various locations. The result is something that calls to mind the recent studies between found sound and silence seen in Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet’s collaborations as well as Michael Pisaro’s recent work with Toshiya Tsunoda. Farmer’s side of the split (titled “let’s grasp it, naked as it is…”) is full of delightfully gurgling electronic-sounding underwater recordings that come across like a dirtied up Chris Watson. Farmer pairs these sounds with quiet ambient recordings that create a similar effect to the white noise of So’s side, yielding an interesting implicit dialogue about the different sonorities of various spaces/noise.
You can listen to excerpts of the album from Experimedia’s SoundCloud below. A limited number of tapes from Wind Measures’ website can be found here..
• Wind Measures: http://windsmeasurerecordings.net
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