Pierre Gerard and Andy Graydon: Untitled, (Magnetisms)
Winds Measure Recordings

An interesting conceptual connectivity underscores this collaborative outing between Pierre Gerard and Andy Graydon. Having been asked by Winds Measure to create a work for cassette tape, the pair fixed their attention on the material dimension of tape technology, and, recognizing that the magnetism associated with the medium also plays a part in other magnetic systems (such as the navigation of migrating birds and the earth's polarity), each sent the other a field recording associated with his home environment for the other to work with.

Credited to Gerard, side one's "Orientation (Magnetite Crystals)" documents the manipulations applied by Gerard to the recording sent by Graydon, specifically a recording of a field recording of bamboo in the forests outside Graydon's childhood home on Maui, Hawaii—not that one would be easily able to extricate the contributions made by Graydon to the twenty-minute meditation, which presents itself as a sparsely populated field of spectral micro-sounds (clicks, whirrs, rustlings, etc.) and textures where extended passages of hiss are as much a part of the piece as the punctuating elements. Side B features a two-part piece by Graydon called "Refrain" that documents Gerard's manipulations of a wooden table outside a house in the French village Espère. What results is a rather more active conglomeration of textures that suggests intermixtures of animal life forms and industrial sounds?even if such evocations are purely illusory. Regardless, the wealth of detail presented on side B—whistling tones, swirls, scrapes, and textural noise of one unidentifiable kind or another—keeps one listening throughout its twenty-minute duration. The collaborative project, which would be of interest primarily to devotees of textural sound art, nevertheless offers an engaging exploration of sound (trans)migrations.

April 2011