Yiorgis Sakellariou
Cueb
COLOMBIA Éter
Editions eter 10 3” CD-R
(2014)
A composer operating exclusively, as far as I am aware,
with his own field recordings, Yiorgis Sakellariou presents us with this neat
little one track 3” cd-r titled after the gallery in London where the piece was
premiered as part of the Sonicueb Festival.
For the sake of transparency, I should divulge the fact that I was
handed this disc personally by Sakellariou at a concert I was involved with at
Kentish Town’s excellent record shop Electric Knife last December.
Cueb was mostly
recorded on the 11th of March 2014 at Canary Wharf in London and its
environs; Sakellariou augmenting the raw material with additional sounds from
his archive to create a single twenty -one minute piece.
Certainly there’s a rhythmic, mechanical quality; sounds that
could be produced by heavy machinery and/or large engines. It seems to me that dynamics are important to
Sakellariou in his work and here is no exception. To balance the noise of the machines at the
beginning is a quiet passage; perhaps those same machines but from a much more
distant vantage point. This section
increases slowly in amplitude until a hard cut throws the listener down an
ill-lit shaft into a section of disused London Underground. As with all of Sakellariou’s work, the
production values are high – the sounds are all crisp and clean and designed to
be played at high volume in order to immerse the listener in his sound-world. What I find particularly satisfying about his
approach is his success in finding ways of juxtaposing commonplace noises in
very musical ways.
A great, although all too brief, release – but I wonder
how many people actually own cd players that have the ability to play 3” discs
these days. I was in a commercial
recording studio recently, and the engineer only had the drive of his Mac to
play cds on and it refused to play a 3” disc; in fact he spent fifteen minutes
coaxing the disc back out of the machine with a pen lid. Could this, like MiniDisc, DAT and DCC before
it, be another digital format to soon become obsolete?
Éter look like an interesting label; they also have in
this download/3” cd series releases by David Vélez, Jose Gallardo, Yann Novak,
Tony Whitehead & Fransisco Meirino and Miguel Isaza among others.
http://eter-lab.net/es/
http://eter-lab.net/es/
