11min: snow
Weather Music

Tim Ingold & Carmen Pardo & Mikel R. Nieto: A soft hiss of this world
Gruenrekorder

Gruenrekorder upholds its reputation for unusual catalogue items with its latest releases, the more conventional of the two a vinyl set by Seoul-based piano-and-drum duo 11min (the album's actually issued by Weather Music with vinyl distribution handled by Gruenrekorder) and the other, a book-and-flexi-disc research project titled A soft hiss of this world, more characteristic of the label's experimental-leaning output. Let's begin with the more accessible release, snow, a six-track, instrumental offering from 11 (pianist Jiyeon Kim) and min (drummer Sangyong Min). As presented on the thirty-seven-minute album, 11min's sound is neither jazz, pop, nor minimal electronica but rather acoustic material sensitive to texture and dynamics, executed with improv-like spontaneity and amenable to electronic treatments. The record splits down the middle, with the A's four pieces credited to 11min and the flip 11 alone, the concluding “loose” and a fourteen-minute remix both Kim productions.

The tracks aren't intended as naked exercises in virtuosic display, which the opening title track makes clear. Here and elsewhere, Kim and Min craft delicate settings where texture is paramount. For “snow,” Min establishes a simple yet nonetheless effective drum pulse with brushes over which Kim drapes equally simple phrases, the pauses between them long enough that pedal sustain is conspicuous. With elements reduced to their essence, one is naturally more attendant to those that are included, in this case the boom of the bass drum, the snare accents, the swish of the hi-hats, and the soft ping of cymbals. In marked departure, the second track, “gust,” leaves little doubt that both Kim and Min possess the technical ability to dazzle, with in this instance rapidly rippling arpeggios accompanied by aggressive drumming that segues from almost breakbeat-tinged expressions to jazz-funk exuberance. “stone” perpetuates the vibe of “gust,” Min ornamenting Kim's minimal gestures with imaginative jazz-funk riffing.

The album's electronic dimension moves to the fore in “snow keeps falling (snowREMIX),” an understated re-imagining of the title track. The makeover hews generally to the style of the original—minimal piano phrases softly murmuring over a restrained drum base—with edits and treatments applied subtly. Stretching out as it does, the piece exudes even more palpably the feel of a relaxed improv with the playing reflecting a high level of attunement between the two. “loose” offers a final twist to the release by augmenting minimal piano chords and a low-key funk groove with wordless vocal musings, Kim's soft accents an appealing element in the arrangement. The closer's restrained attack is in keeping with the album as a whole, which demands attentive listening for its merits to be best appreciated.

Issued as part of Gruenrekorder's Field Recording Series in a 500-copy edition, A soft hiss of this world is, in its visual presentation, a logical sequel to the previous book project by sound artist Mikel R. Nieto: whereas Dark Sound challenged the reader by having its words appear black on black, the new book presents its texts by Nieto, Tim Ingold, and Carmen Pardo as white on white. Such a choice might seem perverse, but there is a reason for it, given that the research project has to do with the ‘sound' of snow, which on the immediate experiential level seems non-existent, and relatedly silence. As with the previous book, the new one's texts are presented in multiple languages, in this case Basque, Spanish, and English.

The genesis for the project was 600 hours of field recordings collected by Nieto in the Finnish landscape, recordings of snow, ice, and snowflakes made using microphones capable of capturing activity at a level below the threshold of human audibility. One particularly fascinating thing about the six minutes of material presented on the transparent flexi-disc is that every time it's played the turntable needle wears away the vinyl such that, like the snowflake, each play brings the recording one step closer to extinction; in Nieto's words, “each listening destroys the sound.” The disc content sounds, in fact, like material decaying before one's ears, the piece unfurling as a blistered, rippling stream of static, noise, and chatter. The impression created is of inaudible phenomena that through magnification reveals the presence of sound, the effect similar to a physical entity that appears static but at a microscopic view shows robust cellular activity.

Ingold, an anthropologist and Professor of Social Anthropology, and Pardo, a Professor at the University of Girona, make compelling contributions to the book. His “Sounds of Snow” casts a phenomenological eye on snow by contrasting a snowflake's sound with that of a raindrop, which makes a tiny plop when it strikes the surface of a lake and loses its form when it hits the ground. But as rain turns to snow, Ingold writes, “the landscape vanishes from hearing.”

Pardo's “Crystals of Silence” begins with an historical account of snow-related visual records, drawings, for example, having appeared in 1637 in Descartes' Discours de la Méthode and a Vermont farmer Wilson A. Bentley recognized for having taken in 1865 the first photo of a snowflake's structure. Yet while the visual classification of the subject advanced, a grasp of its aural character would prove less easy by comparison, especially when the snowy landscape appears to be silent (as Pardo notes, Kandinsky regarded white as both a “non-colour” and a “non-sound”). An appreciation for Nieto's project follows for his attempt to capture the snowflake's sound and recognition of the subject's imminent disappearance, what she characterizes as a “paradoxical search for the appearance and the disappearance at the same time. [Nieto's work] intends to put on record the different sounds of the snow, while at the same time showing that all recording is already a registration of the disappearance of that having been recorded.” His flexi-disc is ostensibly, therefore, “evidence of a disappearance.” She then explores issues of temporality, silence, and nothingness before introducing ideas from an article by Roland Barthes and Roland Havas about different modes of listening and considering Nieto's recording in light of them. At essay's end, a final move sees Pardo referencing the famous scene in Welles's Citizen Kane where the snow globe, itself containing snow falling over a house, falls to the ground and shatters.

Nieto's own text contribution, “This is Nothing,” is in four parts: the first a collection of thoughts on silence, listening, landscape, language, and more; the second a diary-like account that includes photographs; the third code representing “the only thing that could be recovered from all recordings”; and the fourth a treatment of John Cage's “Lecture on Nothing” that alters the text by omitting everything but punctuation marks and its closing sentence. Pithy quotes by Nietzsche, Eliot, Lyotard, and Wittgenstein also appear, as does reference to Heidegger's Dasein.

February 2020