Label: Flaming Pines

タイトル通り"無機質な部屋"を利用したフィールドレコーディング!!シンガポール出身、現在はグラスゴーを拠点に活動するサウンドアーティストJack Vickridge。"空っぽの作業スペース"を楽器として捉え、壁、床、窓にコンタクト・マイクを設置、外部の音を取り込みその屈折プロセスを捉えた壮大なスケールの記録物。小鳥のさえずり、遠くの雑踏、雨音が引き伸ばされ、まるで不明瞭なオーケストラの様に響く、異質ながらも美しい変容を聴く事が出来ます。



"Tones begin to hover, music-box melodies play, and ominous creaks and thuds interrupt. By the end, it’s difficult to remember that this is a building at all, rather than a massive, multi-layered, sound-making machine." -- Bandcamp best Field Recordings of the month column.

The primary instrument here is an empty industrial workspace, which funnels the sounds of the outside through a process of grand refraction. The offhand trills of tiny birds are gathered and stretched into the stirrings of an imaginary orchestra, while the murmurs of distant crowds are recast as choral hums that seep out of the building’s surfaces. Contact mics are attached to the walls, floors and windows – a process through which Vickridge inverts the typical depiction of industrial spaces as sterile and insensitive, revealing them to be generously responsive to even the smallest players in their natural vicinity. The building’s handling of sound is also a perfect analogue to its primary function as a place of industry, pulling in materials from the world outside, breaking and reforming their contours, welding the disparate into strange hybrids.

Sound isn’t the only entity reformed by the space’s interior. The passing of time also undergoes its own manipulations, and we experience Building Instruments as if through the ears of a lone nocturnal inhabitant. Some events appear to be lost to phases of sleep; others are dreamt out of the dark. There are strange extrapolations of the real – soft tones dance like torchlights across the walls, while rainfall stops and starts as if controlled by a divine tap. Vickridge teases colours out of lightless corners, the imagination merging with the building’s own propensity for acoustic conjuration, with listener and space bound evermore intimately into a duet of playful and hallucinatory manufacture.
-- Jack Chuter