Pitchfork

Call me "bush league" or whatever, but I prefer my WFMU Record Fair Xenakis or Stockhausen finds without their liners-- less technical headache, more mystery. Plus, they come cheaper. Well, Philip Samartzis' label, Plates of Sound, has sprung for interminable (and pretty) liner notes, in two languages and character sets; this is money they could have kept and spent on a little more mystery. Here's your quick gloss: Samartzis, a professor or something at Melbourne's RMIT University, went to Tokyo and field-recorded a bunch of everyday type spots. He then laboriously sound-designed the fuck out of his tape, presented it as an eight speaker, quad-sound installation in 2001, and released it as Soft and Loud, first to CD (on his own label, Microphonics), and now to vinyl. It is, according to Samartzis, a narrative documentary type thing that is also democratic, because the mix is layered such that rather than forcing one particular sound or "sweet spot" of reception, the listener can wander around in the sound as he or she chooses.

On the aural upside, Samartzis' ability to clamp down on his crystalline samples varies inversely with his super-loose talking lips (and to be fair, the man helped found Australian pioneer turntable noise act Gum, and rocks with dudes like Keiji Haino and Oren Ambarchi). Dying-art musique concrète might feel too easy for your average MaxMSP G4 wielder, but here, Samartzis acts like he still has to splice his own tape reels. So Soft and Loud is less pastiched than painstakingly sequenced, which sells the whole day-spent-on-a-foreign-park-bench chronology he writes to death on paper. Electronic birdcalls wander in, as do pedestrian crossing noises, dudes yelling-- lots of silence, which only makes sense-- filled out with gentle forest and city clicking.

It's nice, in the CDR era, to trust a composer. His passing train builds smartly into warbling winds, or wet hisses dissolve into a gong; sounds get French-intellectual in the way they inter-refer and derive meaning entirely in juxtaposition. Sure, he does that whole "isn't this pre-recorded chestnut salesman's jingling sales-pitch actually musical?" thing that battles (probably) long dead philistines, but his sense of texture and pace far outweighs his own sense of importance.

The myriad little discretes stack well; Samartzis has invented a wildly dense, interwoven but calm logic for the worlds he recorded. And if that reads too pretentious for ya, figure this: If you haven't been to Tokyo, sounds like you should really go.

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