Simon Whetham’s “Successive Actions” is not so much an album as it is a murmuring labyrinth of discarded whispers, a requiem for obsolete machines played on their own brittle bones. In this latest iteration of his “Channelling” project, Whetham transforms the detritus of consumer technology – motors, mechanisms, and malfunctions – into an orchestra of decay, reanimated by sound and amplified into mesmerizing disarray.
The concept itself reads like a speculative fiction plotline: sounds once captured from mundane phenomena – wind rattling through cracks, doors groaning their final goodnight, traffic sighing in perpetual migration – are funneled into defunct devices. These technological ghosts, startled into sputtering life, produce new sounds, their rhythms simultaneously organic and mechanical, random yet precise. It’s the sonic equivalent of sending dead stars into resonance, their echoes colliding in the void.
From the beginning, “Successive Actions” immerses listeners in a sequence that feels both procedural and chaotic. Opening track “Action” unfolds like the flick of a circuit breaker, a quiet initiation to a process whose repercussions ripple outward. Tracks like “Reaction” and “Overreaction” hum and stutter, their soundscapes alternately serene and volatile. “Redaction” seems to erase itself as it plays, its fragmented tones suggesting memory dissolving into static, while “Compaction” compresses dense textures into bursts of claustrophobic intensity.
The interplay of texture and structure reaches its peak in “Contraction,” a six-minute epic of mechanical tension that breathes like a collapsing lung, and “Distraction,” whose jittery rhythms evoke a machine unraveling its purpose. The closing track, “Protraction,” leaves a faint sonic residue, as if the machines are slipping back into silence, their revolt unfinished but indelible.
Whetham’s artistry lies in his ability to coax emotional resonance from ostensibly lifeless materials. His works are sound sculptures, tracing the hidden vitality of malfunction, the poetics of disintegration. There is a grim irony in the process: technology, once destined for precision and utility, now repurposed as a chaotic muse. It is a reflection of the modern cycle – creation, obsolescence, reinvention – told through reverberations.
The album’s title, drawn from Dirk Raaijmakers’ “The Art of Reading Machines”, frames this interplay of cause and effect, where the discarded becomes an agent of further disruption. “Successive Actions” is not only a meditation on sound but on the very nature of systems, entropy, and the human tendency to repurpose what we abandon.
Simon Whetham, a veteran of environmental sound art, brings his signature approach to this project, combining field recordings, improvised techniques, and an alchemist’s touch for revealing the secret lives of sound. Having performed internationally and curated sonic explorations such as “Corollaries”, Whetham remains one of the most innovative artists in his field, continually bridging the gap between the ephemeral and the tangible.
Listening to “Successive Actions” feels like eavesdropping on the afterlife of machines, their language strange yet familiar. It is music for a world we are both leaving behind and constantly re-encountering – a symphony of friction, failure, and fleeting renewal.
Essential for: fans of experimental sound art, those curious about the intersection of technology and decay, and anyone looking to experience music as an act of poetic transformation. Vito Camarretta
via Chain DLK