Spirits Drifting
Here’s two discs of very enjoyable drone music produced by various processes…Swan Song (CRÓNICA196-2023) was realised by Marla Hlady and Christof Migone, and they did it during a three-month residency in Glenfiddich.
From what I can make out, it’s a clever bit of “repurposing” of old equipment from the Glenfidich still, specifically the copper “swan necks” which are essential to the character of each still, and the taste of the whiskey. According to one online source, “the shape of the swan neck can give the vapours a smooth ride or act as a baffle, leading heavier elements to condense against the copper surface and drop back down into the pot, leaving the lighter elements in the vapour to carry over the top.” When our two European friends arrived in 2019, it so happened that two old stills were being replaced by new ones, and they seized their chance as the crane lowered the copper tubes to the ground. The swan necks became part of a “kinetic sound sculpture”. The musicians used them to amplify sound recordings they made – field recordings captured around the distillery, all methodically listed here, all of them important stages in the production of whiskey (even including the spring water from Robbie Dhu), thus telling the whole story from start to finish, in sound. This results in the quite sublime soaring drones – three very long ones – on the first disc, while the second disc presents eight shorter pieces referring obliquely to pumps, processes, and mash…this second disc, although heavily abstracted, is perhaps the more process-heavy of the two, and not as successful as achieving the sublimation of the three long pieces. Part of that success is down to the choir – not a choir of professional musicians, but workers and staff at the distillery in Dufftown, who were required not to sing in a mass but simply produce two short voice recordings, high and low. Hlady and Migone then arranged the recordings according to a system – some sort of mathematical calculation based on how long the staff had been in the job in relation to the age of the plant.
The project, and the record, align with a certain trend I’ve been detecting in experimental music for a few years now – it’s to do with the decline of built infrastructure, the collapse of certain industries that can’t compete in the modern world, or just general observations on 21st-century decay and entropy. The last time I mused on this trend was here. There was also Iain Chambers and The Eccentric Press record. Many of these projects find ways to capture, or generate, sound from buildings or machinery, and reprocess it into something new. In the case of Swan Song, this time it’s not a pessimistic take, since the distillery in question continues to thrive and do business; the “Swan” part is of course a reference to the copper swan necks, not to the dying gasps of a neglected industry. And as already noted, I like the comprehensive way that their holistic understanding of the process, and their research, has been used to structure this particular piece. From 2nd March 2023. Ed Pinsent