Slow Listener
Live At Fort
Process
UK Chocolate
Monk CHOC425 CD-R
(2019)
Banging and a-clanging like there’s no tomorrow in
suitably mysterious demeanour comes Newhaven’s premier sound-mangler Slow Listener. Noises of beaten metal - dropped, thrown,
chimed, bowed and struck - are arranged in steadily more and more yogic
contortions. These sounds were made
inside Newhaven Fort at last year’s Fort
Process experimental music/sound-art hoe-down. Whether they were pre-prepared or derived
from objects or the environment at the Fort is not stated but it certainly
results in a chewy great wad of sonic paan with which to easily disorient the
unwary spectator. Slow Listener
masticates a cheek-load over the course of 26 minutes; the steel girder
intimidation gradually gives way first to suitably eerie electronic chirps and
whispers and finally to phantom Morse code, slowed vocals, the smallest hint of
Carnival Of Souls-style Wurlitzer, and
electronically processed breathing. Periodically,
a female voice intones eerily “a thousand
and seven, a thousand and twelve; eight, a thousand and five , nine nine three,
nine eight eight; five, nine eight one” and so on. The phrase “A thousand and five falling slowly” is repeated and seems to have
some significance to Slow Listener. I
wonder what this is. A numbers station?
Suitably stimulated by his own actions, Slow Listener
gobs a big red gout of sickly sonic-paan residue out at the feet of Chocolate
Monk heads Dylan Nyoukis and Karen Constance, who quite sensibly immediately
sensed its transcendent potential and put it out as this here cd-r. Constance provides the artwork for the
full-colour sleeve. Edition of 60, and
be warned, Chocolate Monk titles don’t tend to hang around, so show ‘em yr
heels.
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