sunder, unite
The
marvelously concrete title of Sunder, Unite describes the artists’ working
methods, namely separating sounds from their sources and bringing them back
together. Block and Nehil, two young sound artists who live at distant
ends of the country
(Portland and Chicago), painstakingly crafted this 38-minute piece of musique-concrete
over several years of face-to-face and postal collaboration. They took field
recordings of urban spaces, live performances involving amplified grass rustling
and fire crackling, a few instrumental contributions by reed players, and
re-recordings of installations.
They disrupted their source materials by inserting silences and running them
through lo-fi electronics, arranged them, and then swapped recordings and
reworked them some more. The results should consistently engage fans of Metamkine’s
Cinema de L’Oreille series, and like the best of those recordings,
Sunder, Unite encourages the listener to re-evaluate their relationship with
their
environment.
By cutting sounds short or removing them from their surrounding contexts,
the artists encourage the audience to hear them anew, and to hear them now;
after
all, they might not be around long. By juxtaposing sounds, they illuminate
hidden similarities; did you ever consider how similar fire, rain, and static
can sound
to one another? By blurring them until they’re unrecognizable, they
render the commonplace unique. Nehil and Block select sounds rich enough
to stand
up to close scrutiny. They arrange them in non-obvious but intuitively right
ways
that highlights the mystery of sound without actually illuminating it.
> Bill Meyer www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/1545
In many ways Sunder, Unite feels like a continuation of the dialogue that
began with Block's first two recordings, Pure Gaze and Mobius Fuse,
both released
on Sedimental to much acclaim. For those records, her style of composition
centered
on ideas of combination and alignment instead of juxtaposition; the music
achieved a subtle melding of extremes: found sound with scored passages,
orchestrated
parts with improvised elements, and live or "natural" space with
the imagined resonance of synthetic creation. The disparate pieces of Gaze
and Fuse
come together to create half-hour intervals of transcendence, subtle sound
environments as quick to reject the atmospheric, mood-oriented interpretation
as they are
to quietly envelop the most unwilling of listeners. I feel carried through
her deceptively thick and intricate compositions, afloat on currents of
de-sourced field recordings, invisibly suspended piano notes, wind and
brass ensembles
blowing
in as if on short-wave frequency, and all manner of electronic blurts and
organic sounds, sometimes manipulated via sampler, though more often left
unruffled
to hang like flies in the gleaming web of the whole. The sensuous drift
of these
early recordings makes them challenging in the best of ways; Block's thorough
blending of the natural and artificial realms introduces confusion and
disorientation only in afterthought, almost through a willful suspension
of disbelief. Even
the harshest of sounds used, such as the clashing rock and wood noise or
firework explosions in Mobius Fuse, Block treats with the care of a surgeon,
guiding
each into unique functionality without a scrap of sensationalism or over-emphasis.
Sunder, Unite works in similar ways, but with an increasing stress on the
motion and physical manifestation of the piece. This shift in momentum
comes with
the presence of Seth Nehil, who played with Block in Austin's Alial Straa
and whose
impressive solo output focuses largely on rough, physical sounds sourced
in the natural world. Much of the sound on Sunder, Unite comes from previous
live
and
field recordings by Nehil and Block during a Japanese tour where the duo's
performances involved the live, often extreme manipulation of natural objects
like leaves,
grass, and rock. But while these shows seem easily located within the Japanese
noise tradition or the influence of sound artists like Akio Suzuki, Sunder,
Unite is a truly foreign creation. The piece is rarely harsh, nor does
it get caught
up in Suzuki's ponderous method. Block and Nehil recognize the essential
physicality of their source material, but their arrangements show greater
interest in leading
the sounds through the composed drama of the piece's movements ("through," "within," "beyond" etc).
They accomplish this through an elaborate cut-and-paste of the original material,
including the insertion of large chunks of silence and glitch-ist sound-chopping.
Elsewhere synthetic drones or heavily manipulated pieces of the original tapes
form swooning backdrops for the microscopic clatter and pop painstakingly organized
across the Sunder's 40 minutes. Block's contributions become especially effective
as a wind ensemble fades in and out wonderfully on a few tracks. As a whole,
Sunder, Unite echoes Block's previous work in particular, through the subtle
way it brings together (in this case aggressively) natural or organic sound and "artificial" elements
of strict composition and digital deconstruction. The result is music less
concerned with the detail or clash of different sounds than with synthesis
and progression,
an always-beautiful blending of disciplines.
> Andrew Culler http://www.brainwashed.com/brain/brainv07i06.html