John Atkinson:
Quattro Terre
Gertrude Tapes
Ned Milligan: Fricatives
Gertrude Tapes
Partnering with Talya Cooper, John Atkinson issued the memorable album Plains on Ned Milligan's Florabelle label in 2019. Atkinson and Milligan now return with half-hour cassettes but this time for Gertrude Tapes, an Omaha, Nebraska-based imprint specializing in small cassette and vinyl runs. Issued in editions of fifty copies apiece, Atkinson's Quattro Terre and Milligan's Fricatives perpetuate their creators' gift for fashioning engaging blends of field recordings and instrument sounds.
For the four soundscapes on his release, Atkinson worked with sounds he recorded while hiking through the Cinque Terre area of Italy. The opening “Blue Mare” instantly places the listener within a humid, heat-stroked environment via speaking voices and bird chirps, though the sound design quickly changes with the addition of synthetic drones, the move characteristic of material assembled using both real-world and instrument-generated sounds. “World Without End” changes things up by featuring tolling church bells, Atkinson otherwise instating a sense of becalmed stillness through the use of slow-motion electrical murmurings. In similar manner, “Above the Sea” shifts gears by weaving water-related sounds into a convulsing dronescape that's considerably more aggressive and turbulent than “World Without End.” Quattro Terre backs the A side's shorter settings with the side-long “Billy's,” a sixteen-minute excursion that pulls a cornucopia of elements into its orbit, human interaction (what sounds like kitchen activity for one), softly flowing ambient drones, and nature sounds collectively working to produce a daze-inducing swirl. Atkinson's pieces are understated, but there's a definite artfulness to his handling of the materials used in these settings.
If Fricatives is rougher and rawer than Quattro Terre, there's a reason: all but one of Milligan's eight tracks are improvs the New York-based elementary school teacher recorded on a rural porch (“Kathy and Carrie's,” to be precise) in Maine. Representative of the recording's character, a thick mass of ambient hiss blankets the bright glimmer of chimes in the opening “Dream Demo,” while engulfing water flow competes with kalimba-like tones for dominance in the subsequent “White Crappie.” “Two Views of One Sound” downplays ambient textures to accentuate the musical details, though even here rainfall gradually grows in strength until it's emphasized as much as the clinking chimes. Perhaps a bit surprisingly, the one non-porch piece, “Baptismal,” is about as blurry and smudged as the others. If, generally speaking, the ambient dimension's a little too prominent on the release for my taste, there's no denying the production approach imparts a strong sense of place to the presentation. Stated otherwise, it's easy to visualize the setting where Milligan recorded the tracks, especially with one's eyes closed. There's also something undeniably endearing about the idea of someone recording simple improvs on a rustic porch with rustling trees and waterfalls as backdrops.February 2020