John Wall: Alterstill

This is a beautifully packaged CD, from ten years ago, before beautiful packaging was common among the avant-garde fringes. I bought it in Piccadilly Records in Manchester on 1st October 1997 (see also Incursions in Illbient). I can't remember, but I expect my motivations were various: to celebrate the simple fact that it was possible to buy an album this obscure in a shop; to impress Gill, who is quite a Wire-head, by getting something she hadn't heard of but about which I could speak relatively knowledgeably, since I already owned one John Wall CD; to remind myself to go back to that first CD and listen to it more.

For most of my life I've taken a certain pleasure in buying 'challenging' music to see if I could acquire the taste and persuade myself to like it. When I was young and I was taking real risks with the little money I had — as with Ice Cream for Crow — this strategy worked, because I had to convince myself that I hadn't wasted my money. Later on, I could be bold in the record store, but meek and cowardly at home, playing each challenging album once and then adding it to the stack and choosing something more digestible instead.

That's partly why I decided I had to listen to everything in my collection: to remind myself of all those failed challenges, and give them at least one more shot.

And I like listening to this album. But you have to give it time. You have to sit down in front of the stereo without anything to read except the sleevenotes and then you just listen.

The sleevenotes are excellent, and include a concise, insightful appreciation by Paul Schütze, which explains how John Wall's sample-based compositions are in some ways the opposite of John Oswald's Plunderphonics approach:

Each piece is assembled from captured fragments of other recorded works. The sources are diverse and obscure, and anyone hoping to play "spot the sample" will be disappointed. On the rare occasion that you may recognise a moment it is soon inexorably drawn back into the logic of its new context. The parts forfeit their previous identity and fall into irresistible concert.

I think I prefer the Wall approach aesthetically. A couple of years ago I wrote, in an article in The Spectator:

Advocates of a rich digital public domain like to remind us that all great artists draw from the common pool of culture to make their work. But in the drawing and the filtering, the origins are fused together, warped and re-cast. These are resolutely 'analogue' transformations. The trouble with digital content is its obdurate fidelity and the integrity of its bits: even when two tracks are mashed together, they do not lose their identities; you hear first one, then the other, then their collision. You may hear the tracks differently thereafter — as Borges argued a version of Don Quixote reconstituted word-for-word in the 20th century would be different, and richer, than Cervantes' book — but the bits are still the same.

It seems to me that John Wall is taking samples and giving them analogue treatments to make something original, since, as Schütze explains above, the samples do lose their identities. Thus he overcomes my reservations. Here's some more on Wall's compositional process, taken from a curious interview I found:

…first I accumulate samples. These come mainly from twentieth century classical music and occasional avant-jazz, thrash metal, electro-acoustic music and so on. Then comes the lengthy process of assembling these fragments as building blocks for a piece. As for how these fit together, and how the constituent parts are treated, looped, altered in pitch, reversed, it's very much down to intuition. For example, the middle section of Fragmenter features an increasingly layered string quartet sample which remained musically unresolved for some time. This was only 'sorted' when I eventually used a thrash-metal sample which worked so well that it radically changed the way I was looking at the piece, so I completely reworked it. Recognising that moment is crucial.

As to the sound that Wall creates, it's brooding and ominous, with some of the same dynamics as the sound design on David Lynch films: repetitive mechanical sounds of unknown origin, an unsettling hum, which is occasionally punctuated by unexpected and violent blasts of energy. The cliché term nowadays would be "dark and edgy", but some people would have you believe that Pulp are dark and edgy. They should be forced to listen to this album at high volume every time they use the term, until they understand what it means.

MusicBrainz entry for this album John Wall profile

Comments

[steve dAvis]

I read this article today because I was looking for a list of the samples used in 'Alterstill' ~ I guess this is something that probably hasn't been completed yet ~ it would be quite a task.

As for the album, I just keep going back to it. The sounds intrigue me & the way they are put together is astonishing. The layering & the mixing ~ brilliant!

The article in 'Blocks Of Consciousness & The Unbroken Continuum' by Brian Marley really inspired me to follow John Wall ~ I haven't been disappointed.