Articles
2011 10 Favourite Labels
Spotlight 3

Albums
Félicia Atkinson
Autistici
Bee Mask
Biomass
Gui Boratto
Peter Broderick
Benjamin Broening
bvdub
Chicago Odense Ens.
Dday One
Lawrence English
The Field
Nils Frahm
Douglas Greed
Jim Haynes
Hess + McFall
High aura'd
Hior Chronik
itsnotyouitsme
King Midas Sound
Leyland Kirby
Knox & Oberland
Koss/Henriksson/Mullaert
Tom Lawrence
Mist
Phonte
Planetary Assault Systems
Rustie
Sense
Sepalcure
Slove
Splashgirl
Two People In A Room
Vaetxh
Christina Vantzou
Marius Vareid
Wolfgang Voigt
Water Borders
Wenngren & Bissonnette
Xhin
Eisuke Yanagisawa
yMusic

Compilations / Mixes
Above The City
Air Texture Vol. 1
Burning Palms
Emerging Organisms 4
Live And Remastered

EPs
Antonymes/ S. D. Society
Cardopusher
Cyrus
Gulls
Keepsakes
Late Night Chronicles
Old Apparatus
Option Command
Pillowdiver
Benoît Honoré Pioulard
Kevin Reynolds
Strategy

Jim Haynes: The Decline Effect
The Helen Scarsdale Agency

“I rust things.” This pithy statement of purpose by San Francisco Bay Area artist Jim Haynes (also the director of the non-profit sound art organization 23five) opens the doors to an understanding of his approach and work, the latest example of which is documented in a double-album vinyl set packaged in a beautiful gatefold sleeve (limited to 350 copies). Electroacoustic soundsculpting of a resolutely uncompromising and experimental kind, Haynes' recording uses decay and corrosion as springboards for four long-form settings birthed from broken electronics, shortwave radio static, contact microphones, tape decay, controlled feedback, textural scrapings, and manipulated field recordings. While his is an entropic art centering on notions of collapse and disintegration, it's also one rich with ravishing detail and as such commands one's attention for the full measure of its seventy-six minutes.

“Ashes” presents twenty minutes of crackling embers, corrosive textures, and grinding machine noise through which a droning swarm threads itself. Advancing and receding throughout, the droning mass exudes a ghostly character, and appears never more haunted than when the muffled murmur of voices moves to its forefront during the piece's second half. Ghostlier still is “Cold,” in which Haynes uses harmonics and overtones from various wire recordings to create a spacious, hollowed-out meditation—until, that is, the relative quietude is disrupted by a stabbing smear of distortion and grime that sounds like it could have originated from a guitar. An intended approximation of radioactive decay, “Half-Life” adds a rhythm dimension to the recording in the form of a geiger counter-generated gallop that quietly trots alongside an ongoing stream of cavernous whooshes and crystalline creaks. Sourced in part from thermal vents and geysers at Lassen Volcanic National Park, “Terminal” concentrates on gurgles and hiss for its first eight minutes, after which the hiss abruptly falls away and then returns at varying levels of intensity, sometimes so forcefully it drowns out the geological activity, until the collective mass reaches a climactic broil. As should be patently obvious, the four sides offer a diverse wealth of sound, with pretty much all of it sourced from natural and industrial realms rather than conventional instrumentation.

It hardly surprises that, before turning to sound art, Haynes was a visual artist whose works incorporated materials such as wood, paper, metal, photographs, and glass. Of especial note is the fact that he grew sensitive to the decaying properties inherent in photography and thus transposed that sensitivity into other areas in order to explore entropy in general and the relationship between time and erosion. For Haynes, transformation and thus decay are both omnipresent and inevitable, if largely invisible to the naked eye, and his works address such themes at multiple levels—literally, in the settings' ever-mutating surfaces, and conceptually, too. In these four pieces, Haynes finds the beauty in decomposition and translates it into a soundsculpting style that's uniquely his.

November 2011