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Extract – Portraits Of Sound Artists (Nonvisualobjects)

Thanks in part to Resonance FM, the art/noise radio station run by London Musicians Collective, and thanks in part to cheap technology, sound art is less a samizdat activity and more obviously a community-minded experience, practiced in solitude but disseminated with ease. This exquisitely packaged release from Vienna’s Nonvisualobjects label, founded in 2005 by Heribert Friedl and Raphael Moser with the aim of focussing on ‘interpretations of minimalism in sound’ is a bumper compendium of hiss and fissures, environmental ambient, deep listening rhapsodies and deconstructed noises off.

Presented in a numbered edition of just 500, the 22 pieces spread across two CDs alone are an attractive enough proposition. The 96 page hard-backed book which houses them inside its lavish but minimal design tells the black and white of it even more. By way of a grab-bag of interviews, testimonies, note-book jottings, drawings and photographs, each artist is afforded space to sketch out their practices and working methods as they see fit.

So, while some, including Richard Chartier and Friedl himself, who contributes (albeit with his back to the camera), submit to a generic Q and A, Taylor Deupree offers up down-time snapshots of his sojourns in Japan to accompany his ‘Live In Osaka’ excerpt, John Hudak doodles some cartoon figures, and others including Keith Berry and Steinbruchel offer impressionistic auto-biography, including Berry’s boy-hood relationship to David Lynch and the all-pervading monster that was his house’s rattling heating system.

Such aesthetic attention to contextual detail and immaculate if occasionally eccentric packaging recalls the back-catalogue of Jon Wozencroft’s Touch label, home to Philip Jeck’s sound collages constructed out of junk shop vinyl manipulated through equally antique record players, and former Cabaret Voltaire and Hafler Trio experimentalist turned environmental sound recordist Chris Watson. Touch is currently celebrating its low-key longevity via a 25th anniversary series of live events.

Equally ongoing is ‘Unknown Public’, the themed mail-order quarterly of new music which ‘Extract’ also resembles in part. That both these imprints came out of the UK is miracle enough testament to the hidden wiring that has existed for decades here now. That they have survived on their own terms, while young turks such as Guestroom, another London outpost of sound and vision on page and plastic, pick up the post-modernist slack, is even more revelatory.

Coming out of Vienna, then, ‘Extract’ goes beyond its subjects rattle and hum to more Zen-like application. As the title implies, many of the barely-there wares on display don’t come in their completed form, but are rather tasters of larger works and dropped in without beginning or end. So the chimes of Steve Roden’s ‘air into form/noise into breath’ may be at odds with the hymnal gothic formalism of Ubeboat’s ‘Lux Vivens,’ but there’s nothing jarring about the leap.

Also present is Toshiya Tsunoda, who recently took part in environmental sound installations presented as part of NVA Organisation’s ‘Half Life’ project, a series of spectral installations which took place in Kilmartin Glen, Scotland

There are times, as with Tsunoda’s self-explanatory ‘Scenery of vibration/Listening to the reflection of points (@Westspace)’, when the work might be best heard in situ on some increasingly de rigeur sonic walk or other. Most of the time, though, ‘Extract’ is an enticing and sublime set of pointers to spaces and places heard if not always seen.

www.nonvisualobjects.com

MAP magazine, October 2007

ends

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