contact microphones under duress

 

Simon Whetham

Forced To Repeat Myself

USA  Misanthropic Agenda  mar056  CD  (2020)

Misanthropic Agenda may be known for their earlier output from noise artists such as Lasse Marhaug, Merzbow, John Wiese, and Sissy Spacek but more recently, the label has recently released material that could be described as coming more from the experimental music/sound-art frontiers by people like Joe Colley, Fransisco Meirino and Andrea Borghi, so Whetham is in appropriate company here.

It seems to me that Simon Whetham is concerned with the Interior.  Not only the interiors of the rooms he performs in; his and our own interior worlds.  In a similar way to Rie Nakajima or, Choi Joonyong or Holly Jarvis, he analyses the physical attributes of his performance environment and extracts auditory information from it using a selection of his most appropriate techniques.

On Forced To Repeat Myself, he presents eight tracks portioned out of performances from a 2018 tour in Europe.  The sleeve cites nine locations - Vilnius, Bologna, Marghera, Acqui Terme, Turin, Milan, Cagliari, Pietrasanta and Dortmund - so I assume some or all of the eight tracks are assembled from multiple concerts, rather than each track being a direct document of a particular performance.  This is confirmed by Whetham’s statement that the album was “composed” in Marseilles in 2020, making it less a document, rather a piece in itself.  As such, Whetham takes admirable liberties with the idea of a “cohesive production” and combines audio that seems to have been recorded in many varied and interesting ways.  One moment you are listening to his devices from a distance on the distorted and heavily compressed built-in mics of ghetto blasters - and various other recorders of differing types no doubt - the next you are up close to the action with a loud direct feed from the mixing desk of one of his contact mic’s attached to an unknown surface.  Objects and devices move, rotate, perhaps even perambulate around the performance space(s).  In the absence of any visual information on the cd packaging bar two photographs of rows of empty seating - which may have anything or nothing to do with these live concerts - we will likely never know what we are actually listening to.  But I like this.  What I have gleaned about Whetham's practice is that he combines sounds which are normally too quiet to be noticed with self-built devices that mostly seem to be designed to produce acoustic sound, either by themselves or when interacting with the performance space in some way.  I have also known him to experiment with pushing audio equipment to destruction in various ways in previous work, but again, in the absence of sleeve-notes other than a simple “…all source materials…were extracted from performance recordings…” what specific techniques and “instrumentation” - if that is the correct word, even - are also unknown.  You do get the feeling that things are set up by Whetham and then left to their own devices and accidents or unintentional events are encouraged; a microphone dies in a hail of electronic pops on track six, elsewhere things collapse, spill, stop working, bump into each other, scrape along the floor or are perhaps even flung out of the artist’s way.  Over and over again.  It’s like Whetham takes a living gallery installation with him on tour. 

Lovely design on the packaging.  The heavy card digipak with high quality black and white print shows off the images by Monica Nannini, Laure Catugier and Jürgen Dünhofen well.  The circular disc image is by Whetham himself.  Recommended.  

 https://misanthropicagenda.bandcamp.com/album/forced-to-repeat-myself