From Matilde Meireles I reviewed a cassette before, ‘The Life Of A Potato’ (see Vital Weekly 1316), for the same label, now releasing, ‘Loop. And Again’, which isn’t the same colourful title as before. Meireles uses field recordings to compose site-oriented projects., and “investigates the potential of listening across spectrums and scales as ways to attune to various ecosystems and articulate plural experiences of the world. Some examples include the inner architectures of reeds and complex water ecologies, resonances in everyday objects, local neighbourhoods and the architecture of radio signals”. On her new album, she works with “the dynamics of magnetic fields”. This project she did in Belfast and “In the project, sound suggests different ways to engage with Belfast, where walking routes could be improvised to incorporate the drones as part of how we experience the city.” I am sorry about these lengthy quotes. There is a lot more to quote from, but essentially, she made her recordings with two contact microphones and an electromagnetic sensor of the overall environment of the city and the river Lagan, and sometimes they are processed. The opening piece, ‘Introducing Variables’, is a beautiful piece of gorgeous drones that sound like sine waves and in and out of the mix we have the floating city and river sounds. It all sounds very tranquil, which may seem odd for a city of unrest. Something happens in the second piece, ‘Magnetic Fields’, relying even more on drone-like loops with robust ambient quality and the field recordings on a sparser level. The last piece is ‘Cross Parade’, which is a break with the other two. Here are some private home recordings, including trombone improvisations by Tullis Rennie, who worked on the same project a few years ago. Here too, we find some long-form tones, but now from the trombone, which makes for a distinctive, different sound, along with a discussion at the breakfast table. Not bad, just different and something one could consider putting on a different album, or maybe add one of these and have a different balance? It’s a minor thing on an otherwise fine album. (FdW)
via Vital Weekly