Everyone has a favourite place, be it cosy internal retreat or cherished patch of Great Outdoors. Forest, bathtub, museum and alley find common cause on this audio-document from Sheffield experimental electronica label, Audiobulb, compiling ten pieces representing selected artists' Favourite Places. Captured field recordings blend with musical treatments to make mementoes enfolding inspiring source within inspired composition.
Taylor Deupree – whose “6 a.m.” is one of the most successful pieces in its equilibrium of environment and music - is content to watch the sun rise amid the susurration of his native New Yorker wildlife, insect chatter shading into shimmering tones, then adding languid guitar colourings.Biosphere, on the other hand, typically questing for more polar extremes, won’t settle for anything less than a swarm of terns clacking angrily around a Norwegian lighthouse ("Tranøy Lighthouse") to sandwich his woozy waltz-beat filling. RF’s serene stroll around Shimogamo Shrine, to the accompaniment of oh-so tasteful acoustic guitar plucking and Midori Hirano heart-felt warblings, is a rather too precious delicacy for this listener. And Claudia’s studio apartment setting for “In Case there is An Emergency” results in a collage of voices, found sounds, and broken toy-tronics that proves slightly enervating. A far more febrile soundscape comes from John Kannenberg, who fixates on public space on “The Mausoleum of All Hope and Desire”, a reverberating drono-lithic collage sampling the British Museum's Great Court. Sundry voices, footsteps, externations, and objects in motion evolve into a euphonic soundwhirl. A stand-out too is a name familiar from previous Audiobulb compilations, Build, whose cinematic drive along Robert Moses Causeway to a somewhat perturbed sounding ocean is envisioned in shimmering digi-tones and sinuous glitch-stitched skitter-beats, climaxing in chiming electro-ambient orchestrality (“Untitled”). Some pieces, however, err in overindulging of topos at the expense of Musae. Three minutes of Dot Tape Dot’s bathtub splashings on “Shower Time and Glockenspiel” and a similar stretch of Leafcutter John’s workshop sawings are the type of contributions that tend to add fuel to Mr and Mrs Mainstream’s suspicions of ‘experimental’ music, i.e. it doesn’t serve well as music. Overall, though, a good balance is achieved across the set between pitched and unpitched material. The artist formerly known as The Quiet American choreographs layers of crowd noise, chants, resonating bells, and the hiss of steam in a boiling pot to create a transportive exhibit in the melding of everyday ephemera into backstreet symphony. It's soundwalk-manAaron Ximm, giving a glimpse of the possible music of environments in a clangorous meander through Varanasi’s old city near the Ganges river; his “Chai in the City of Light”, though on the surface bereft of conventional musical sonorities, somehow through compositional sleight of hand approximates the sound of music. Finally, we come near full circle with Nomad Palace's “Northern”, a piece borne of a lakeside family cottage location, proffering a stretch of the elemental that segues into a sad-happy sliver of 12k-style organic electronica. Imbued with the wistfulness of personal archaeology, it serves to shepherd the Favourite Places project mission, as articulated by Audiobulb leading light, David Newman - to "inspire the audience to become increasingly active listeners whilst experiencing their own favourite places” - to a satisfyingly emotionally resonant closure.
Enhancing this aural assemblage is a fold-out poster giving written and visual coordinates for each place documented. A further dinky design detail is that each individual CD features a unique location dot matrix representing the ten tracks - hand-made designs that bring a unique design aesthetic into play with the art of noise, sound and vision of the assembled sonicians in what is ultimately a satisfying multimodal experience of travelling without moving.
