VIOLET

The sun is shining and the flowers are blooming on violet street

3” CD, scarecelight

A record consisting of field recordings has a hard time usually, especially when those sounds are mostly unmanipulated everyday indoor sounds, e.g. of water running or someone’s snoring(!). Not only do they have to fight the “I can hear that all the time”-sentiment – which wouldn’t be so bad if those speaking those words sat down once in a while to listen to these sounds at all – and the clutter of everyday noise already surrounding the listener. And another word to the “unmanipulated”: A lot of times I can’t tell if sounds are really unmanipulated. The closer I try to listen the more my concentration starts to play tricks on me and I hear all kinds of micro-tonal shifts, clicks and scratches here and there, which could be from everywhere between the digital date stored on a CD to the innermost kernel of my brain, not excluding the sound a stereo-set makes when producing sounds. In this way my ears seem to still receive some high frequency after this CD has stopped. Maybe some kind of telepathic signal from somewhere?

The easily discernible basics of the opening track aside and also foregoing the earsplitting noise drone of the third, the second – and in some ways central – track of “the sun is shining and …” is definitely the centrepiece of this record. Sounds processed to build the impression of being somewhere inside a cave with water dripping into some big sea below the surface of the earth and a machinery softly working behind the walls of the cave. That is where the journey starts, but I won’t give away as where it leads to, but there is more machinery, aluminium foil, glaciers and human minds involved.

Violet is Jeff Surak, who has done sound experiments beginning from the Eighties, spent most of the Nineties in Russia doing life performances and now lives in Washington DC (where he was born), where he runs the Zeromoon label. Currently he is involved with two groups: Normal Music and Critikal (with Andrey Kiritchenko and Jonas Lindgren). His list of collaborations and discography is enormous, even though most of it remains strictly in the underground (Alexei Borisov and Frans de Waard being among the better known names.) I guess this is as good as an introduction to the man as anything, if you have missed out these last two decades. (like me, which is further proof that there is a lot of interesting music out there if you only started listening.)