Genre: Avant-garde / Sound Art / Experimental
Track Listing:
01 Real Mass
There are times when I slap a CD in the player, press PLAY and then, after listening intently for a while, wonder what the hell I am going to write about this one. It isn’t even a question of suddenly coming upon a writer’s block, or that I lack the necessary words. Sometimes what I have been asked to pontificate and expound upon is so nebulous and abstruse that words simply refuse to handily present themselves as they normally do. This present disc, one of the entries in Lona Records’ 3” single series, was just one such case.
Roel Meelkop’s (THU20) just over 19-minute long sound essay is never less than quiet and subtle, corralling sounds garnered from just about everywhere it seems and ultimately sculptured and fine-tuned to create a haunting, almost inaccessible, piece. Silence is equally partnered with sound, distant murmurings bubbling up from a nebulous, formless void. One could almost posit that here we see these two elements shadowing yet ultimately complementing each other, emphasising just how important they are to each other’s existence, conferring shape and substance on the other while operating as the their polar opposite simultaneously. Chiaroscuro is often an important element in delineating contrast, and here it’s used to excellent effect.
I have to note here that very often the purpose of such pieces eludes me, which is not to say that I consider them worthless. In the rarified stratospherics of sound collage, one often finds it difficult to discern a theme. Even the reference to the website blurb fails to enlighten on this occasion. However, despite my initial difficulties, it IS possible to hear stories being told here. The entire piece is laced with an icy cold presence, one particular resonance seeming to jibe with me – just pure, simple freezing emptiness. I imagined expanses of night-black space, occasionally broken by dust-clouds of particulate activity in varying degrees of excitation. However, these small episodes merely function as a pointed highlight, emphatically drawing attention to the void beyond their limited borders. As a consequence, loneliness is the overwhelming feeling I take from this. It’s the flickering TV set or the distant voices on a radio reaching out to the isolated and cut off. It’s the brief glimpse of something solid yet fleetingly intangible caught in the glare of headlights spearing the darkness on a lonely road somewhere. It’s the small noises one hears in a broken down, old and deserted hospital, where the voices of both life and death seem to have taken on an echoing tangibility of their own. It’s the little creaks in quiet places, only discernible because of the silence. It’s also the faint whooshing of a jet passing overhead in a clear blue sky when the rest of the world is holding its breath...
These are the multitudinous textures that combine to paint a vision of space, illimitable in extent. This can either be exhilarating, invested with a concomitant boundless freedom unconstrained by parameters; or it can be simply terrifying, like when a prisoner, cooped up for so long and is now suddenly given freedom, is aware that he is no longer defined by four walls. One can either dive headlong into the void willingly or turn away afraid of what might lurk there. One can either wrap oneself in its potential closeness or reject its overwhelming claustrophobia. Here, one can either find or lose oneself.
And all this depth in just 19-minutes, and achieved with a judicial appraisal of the material at hand. It would be stating the obvious then that Meelkop’s relationship with sound is close, utterly tuned in to its nuances and subtleties, to say nothing of inherent potentialities. Craft has been exercised here as well as attention to detail, an aspect which is only made apparent after repeated, and close, hearings. Rather than the cold exercise in abstruse theory I imagined it to be, I found it speaking to me in a way that was scarcely anticipated. It drew me in, despite its creeping tendency toward claustrophobia, and revealed more colour and movement than a cursory listen would indicate. It is little surprises like this that prove that experimental music isn’t as barren and soulless a pursuit as some would categorise it.
