available on Crónica
Corollaries 6 / Crónica 114~2016
Prevailing Wind, Tangled Under (46:12)
Composed by John Grzinich.
Assembled from two durational single-take recordings, one made during Active Crossover: Mooste with Simon Whetham, Arlene Tucker and myself in May 2015 and a second solitary session in June.
Mastered by Miguel Carvalhais.
Extended recordings of the large old abandoned resonant water tower that I’ve featured on numerous occasions. This piece was mixed from two recordings sessions. Apart from some equalization and level adjustments, the original recordings have been left unprocessed.
This is the sixth release in the series Corollaries, that compiles works resulting from Active Crossover: Mooste, a cross-cultural collaborative residency curated by Simon Whetham and hosted by MoKS, in April and May 2015. All works are composed from material compiled in a collective archive during the project.
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Featured on Headphone Commute’s Best of 2016 : Music For Bending Light And Stopping Time
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Review by Massimo Ricci on Touching Extremes.
Attributing a value to forlorn locations through the assessment of their resonant qualities represents a sort of transference of power. When a sound artist (presumably gifted with deeply perceptive features) sets conditions for a given structure to vibrate, the spontaneous generation of a different type of life occurs. The resulting interaction gains or loses strength according to contingent forces at work, but (sure enough) the hugeness of a reverberation is one of the few things able to connect the most audacious experiment to the realization of being, after all, extremely limited.
John Grzinich (assisted in some of these recordings by Simon Whetham and Arlene Tucker) is one of the best (men for the job) when it comes to producing sonic elements with a purpose from materials that would appear as good as dead to the average observer. In Prevailing Wind, Tangled Under he sensibly elected to let a water tower in Mooste, Estonia express its acoustic vigor without interruptions. A modicum of variety in the timbral gamut comes from what the mastermind describes as “crawling about, climbing, plucking, bowing, striking, howling, stringing and generally playing”. The 46 minutes reveal a practical harmonization between the human and the (theoretically) inanimate. Occasionally, a welcome complement (the chanting of assorted species of birds) introduces further suggestions beyond the ominous roars, wavering frequencies and various clangors characterizing at large the textural mass.
The whole transmits a sense of conscious persistence, in a way symbolizing an obstinate attempt to distill juices of critical energy in places where most people’s logic would suggest a refusal of possibilities. Molecules are everywhere, though; hence, our weight in the universal ambit equals that of a rock (or a water tower, for that matter). Better learn the lesson once and for all.
