This is a great example of acoustic ecology, or environmental recordings, call them what you will. It combines samples of dogs barking, bells ringing, fish markets, Japanese monks and flutes, some of which are provided more or less 'as-is' while others are treated, filtered, slowed down or whatever. There are some purely synthetic, composed elements as well.
I played this a couple of nights running, just after midnight, with the window open. No matter how much you turn it up, much of the album is very quiet. The sounds blended with the breeze in the big plane tree outside the window, and the occasional distant siren on Old Street or City Road. Some of the three-minute-long tracks are almost completely silent. It forces you to adjust your listening.
As the official page from Christophe Charles explains, this is a CD-ROM as well. That was one of the things that attracted me to it when I read about in The Wire in about 1997. If you put it into a Mac running System 7 or OS8, you got an interface that enabled you to re-combine the samples and other elements — though, being programmed in Max/MSP, I think it was pretty complex to use, and I didn't get very far with it. I couldn't get it to run at all on OSX.
| Discogs entry for this album |
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