Label: Flaming Pines

素晴らしいテクスチャーの内容!!英強者サウンドアーティスト二者が結成した新デュオユニット!!レーベルFlaming Pinesを主宰し多くの音楽家の作品をリリース、並行してロンドンより自身の音活動を発信するサウンドアーティストKate Carr。同じく英国を拠点に活動するバリトンサックス奏者兼作曲家であり、様々なアンサンブルで演奏しているCath Roberts、この二者が新たに始動したプロジェクトQuartz Sand。音の衝突、色彩の奔流、無骨な輪郭が突如として照らし出される瞬間を捉え続ける、目まぐるしい素材が混濁する非常にストレンジなコンクレート作品。





A churn of electronic noise is flung into dialogue with the smeared and manipulated bleats of a seagull horn, the former like the grind of agricultural machinery, the latter like prolonged saxophone missives or doppler-arced racetrack noise. We encounter many moments like this throughout Stratigraphy: gushes of clashing colour, sudden illuminations of jagged edges. This is how Kate Carr and Cath Roberts resist the absolute fusion of their respective sound worlds, rekindling our awareness of their status as separate entities. Yet their dynamic is anything but antagonistic. Instead they delight in their assimilative limits, relishing the quiet charge of combining drones at crooked angles, or how creaking wood nestles awkwardly into sputters of raw synthesiser. Patiently and playfully, the players locate points of contact within each other that incite a certain murmuring and restless deadlock, pressing into the hard-stops of elemental disparity.

The album takes its name from the study of rock layering, which is centred on the law of superposition: in a stratigraphic sequence, the oldest rock layers are found at the bottom. Aptly, these two extended compositions feel adherent to a "vertical" sort of time; not just in how they refute linear forms of progression, but also in their stacking of brighter, crisper textures – chimes, jangles, squeals – atop the more primally-derived poolings of resonance and feedback. Samples embark on loops, slurp into reverse, belatedly reprise themselves. Linear time is crushed into a simultaneous jostling of disparate eras, with the vibrancy of the present tense perched atop a crooked catalogue of stalled histories.