Christoph Collenberg, Jakob Gengenbach & Bernd Herzogenrath: un|sounding the self — a portrait
Gruenrekorder

Enrico Coniglio: Teredo Navalis
Gruenrekorder

All three of these recent Gruenrekorder releases are quintessential label products: adventurous, thought-provoking, and unusual. Michael Lightborne's and Enrico Coniglio's are grounded in field recordings, Coventry Ring Road and the Venetian Lagoon the sites used for their respective projects; an entirely different animal, un|sounding the self — a portrait combines an hour-long video and booklet for its in-depth portrait of American artists Christopher Shultis and Craig Shepard.

Issued in vinyl and digital formats, Lightborne's thirty-three-minute Ring Road Ring is strongly rooted in a geographical location, with its seven tracks using low-level vibrations pulsing through Coventry Ring Road as a springboard (to capture the sounds, he attached contact microphones to concrete pylons supporting the road). Built in Coventry, England between 1960 and '74, the road formed part of the city's rebuilding plan after WWII and was intended to keep growing levels of traffic away from the city core as well as promote the idea of a pedestrian-focused setting. Today, however, the project is regarded as something of a failure as it's alienated pedestrians and had a detrimental effect on the city centre; as a result, plans are afoot to disassemble and repurpose the structure (one rumour has it that the road may be closed to traffic and converted into a city park).

In every one of these soundscapes, texture and reverberation are paramount. A collage of largely untreated field recordings, the opening track, “Ring Road Ring,” is the longest at eleven minutes as well as the ‘purest.' Even so, a vaguely melancholic, even lonely character emerges from the muffled stream and its punctuating clatter, so tangibly, in fact, that Lightborne's likening of its ‘music' to a “lament” begins to seem more than a little plausible. Further to that, when a metronomic clicking pattern surfaces, the grainy material begins to suggest some degraded form of experimental techno, the kind of industrial concoction one could image booming from the bowels of a hazy club at three in the morning.

The other tracks build on “Ring Road Ring” by using it as raw material for the creation of so-called “poetic interpretations” of the road. Smothered in gaseous vapours, “Fortran” could be mistaken for an early Basic Channel production or even perhaps some eerie alien transmission captured using broken-down equipment. The sonic character of “Moebius Loop” evokes the image of a figure lurching through a cavernous space, whereas “Shepherd Tone” exudes a rather nightmarish quality in suggesting scrambled voices accessed via seance. If “Ring Cycles” exhibits a stronger electronic character than the others, it's because Lightborne worked into its combustible assembly induction coil recordings of the electromagnetic fields surrounding and emanating from the structure. Each vinyl side, by the way, includes a locked groove at the end, the gesture fitting for a project whose subject matter operates as a continuous roundabout.

While work by Coniglio has appeared on many a label (Touch, Infraction, and Dronarivm three of many), Teredo Navalis is the first time the Italy-based guitarist, field recordist, and sound explorer has appeared on Gruenrekorder. The thirty-eight-minute CD finds him firmly in soundscaping mode, its five tracks constituting the next chapter in his ongoing study of the Venetian Lagoon (the title, incidentally, refers to a marine organism also described as a bivalve mollusc or naval shipworm that commonly dwells in the wood of ships). Using electromagnetic sensors, hydrophones, and contact, condenser, and binaural microphones, Coniglio gathered sounds during the night at the north side of the lagoon, a site home to crabbers, gulls, and native terns but also boats used for public transportation. One of his goals with the project was to document in sound the fragile balance between the setting in its natural state and the impact human intervention has had upon it. While untreated aquatic sounds form the basis for the work, the compositional process involved an intense layering of micro-elements.

Initiating the recording immersively, “Fraìma” transports the listener to a zone where subdued rustlings, rattlings, and burblings appear amidst loud rumblings, the cumulative effect reminiscent of a granular micro-electronic soundscape, its connections to water-related field recordings only surfacing directly in the track's final minute. Low-level electronic noises in “Zenzìva” could pass for the amplified capture of micro-level chatter between insect life-forms. Seventeen minutes in total, the three-part title track advances from the restless streams of rippling and rustling that dominate the first to the alien attack that arises during the second's mini-dronescape and the industrial clangour that engulfs the third. Though the recording's connection to its field recordings origins might often seem on purely sonic terms tangential, Teredo Navalis is a fascinating listen nonetheless.

Both components of un|sounding the self — a portrait are required for a proper appreciation of this ambitious creation. Reading the booklet, a 116-page ‘Field Manual' featuring texts by the artists, the director Christoph Collenberg, and the collection's editor Bernd Herzogenrath, without the film makes for an incomplete experience; watching the hour-long DVD without the clarifying details provided by the booklet is just as incomplete. (In Collenberg's words, un|sounding the self — a portrait is an “experimental, audiovisual double portrait that borrows from a documentary approach.”)

However different Christopher Shultis, percussionist and Professor Emeritus of the University of New Mexico, and Craig Shepard, trombonist and Wandelweiser collective member, are in their artistic expression, their interests converge in two key areas: their lives, philosophies, and creative approach have been profoundly influenced by Henry David Thoreau, specifically his thoughts about walking and natural sound, and the art and writings of John Cage. Triggered by keywords provided by the filmmaker, Shultis and Shepard ruminate during the film on a broad range of topics, among them dreams, silence, sacred places, compositional practice, stage fright, and Cage's 4'33” (described by Shultis as a “a good example of communal silence”).

Memorable statements emerge during the hour-long presentation, which alternates between images of nature and the city, the artists pontificating, and performance footage filmed in Olomouc, a city in the Czech Republic the artists visited for a week at Herzogenrath's invitation on the occasion of his annual course 'Theory into Practice.' Shultis says at one point, “Practicing is a dangerous word for a musician because it too often is about habit and not enough about exploration,” words that will resonate with any musician learning an instrument. His remembering of a line by Cage that “the problem with 4'33” is that it has a beginning, middle, and end” likewise resonates meaningfully.

One way in which the two differ is in their position on silent walks, Shultis preferring to be alone on his and Shepard a proponent of both solitary and communal walks; while the one he led in Olomouc, his eighteenth silent walk, involved thirty-four participants, others have been undertaken alone, including a 250-mile trek across Switzerland completed in thirty-one days in 2005. Both artists promote the salutary effects of multi-hour walks, less for the physical benefits and more the heightening of the senses and boosts to creativity.

A particularly gripping part of the film is the one showing Shultis doing a solo performance at the Kaple Božího Tela, the footage mesmerizing in showing him coaxing sounds from wind chimes, rattles, tree branches, lettuce, and a small cactus, with most of the objects laid out on a small table. The combination of deep engagement by Shultis, the chapel setting, and the attentive audience makes for a particularly engrossing sequence (the pieces performed are Cage's 1975 work Child of Tree and Shultis's own 1989 homage to it, 64 Statements re and not re Child of Tree). A work by Shepard also appears within the film, his trumpet performance of Dornach, den 2. August 2005 surfacing intermittently.

July 2020