VA: Diary of a Sweet Day
Post.disco

There's not a whole lot of information available for this release though a few details can be passed along: the 19-track compilation Diary of a Sweet Day is the inaugural release for post.disco, a label established by B33P3R (Tolga Taluy) and GoGooo (Gabriel Hernandez) in 2005 when the two were studying at l'Ecole Supérieure d'Art de Grenoble in France. The collection is an “aural diary of a certain day,” with a largely unfamiliar (to me at least) group of contributors asked to incorporate sounds from everyday life into their material.

More often than not, that translates into placid electroacoustic settings ornamented by field elements that span a wide range of human experience: traffic noises, hydraulic sounds, people talking, church bells, kitchen activity, bird chirps, cat meows, etc. All glockenspiel tinkles and acoustic guitar strums, dot tape dot's pretty opener “Ventano” is a representative example of the bucolic style; others are more collage-styled in nature, jarring assemblages of musical fragments and electronic noise (“Brocoli” by Sebastien Roux and Christophe Bailleau, Nobuko's “Nuine,” Art2Fakt's “eliode1”). A few pieces would sound equally at home on a 12k compilation as they do here (the microtonal calm of Won's “A Flower,” the gently rippling surfaces of E D A's “061205 Ordinary Computer Day (Humans & Computer Drones)”). Memorable moments include the dancing flutes that billow into lulling weaves in B33P3R's “Love Fight,” ghostly guitar streams that flow through the haunted ruins of Karras's “Evening Mood No.1,” and Lem's entrancing closer “Lempark.” Though overlong at 78 minutes, Diary of a Sweet Day is a more-than-credible addition to the field-oriented soundscaping field.

October 2006