Simon Whetham continues his plan to draw attention to minimal, imperceptible, and overlooked sounds. He’s in the middle of an ongoing kinetic sound performance thing called “Channelling”, of which the CD Successive Actions (CRÓNICA 225) is a part. On it, he repurposes the motors from discarded or broken household objects, and somehow re-activates them by playing sound recordings through them. This entire process results in further sounds, which are amplified with microphones; he re-records and presents them here as 16 short experiments. I’d kinda like to know more about which kind of objects were salvaged from the trash of consumer society, and the methods and techniques by which he sparks them back into life using a jolt of audio juice much like some 21st-century Victor Frankenstein – but this might be irrelevant. I think the chain of reprocessing is what’s important to Whetham, and the layers of recording technology he uses to build that chain. The finished results on Successive Actions are very abstracted, micro-events that seem to have no corresponding analogue in the real world. We enjoyed his (II)nTolerance record a few years ago which was informed by anger and impatience, but no such emotional turmoil here. Ed Pinsent