Reviews

Boomkat

The lead artist in this project is that great master of abstract electronic music, Francisco Lopez, whose studies of noise, silence and the fabric of recorded sound have been a major presence in the realm of electroacoustic music over the past ten years or so. In this instance Lopez collaborated with a host of regional sound artists, collecting field recordings from around the city, shaping them into streams of decontextualised noise that are typical of Lopez's more challenging brand of microsound. Several of the participants come from an academic background, while others are self-taught, but in all cases the compositional approach eschews the more casual and pastoral tendencies of the genre. There's some great (if confrontational) material on offer: Annie Mahtani's cinematic 'Shadows', Mark Harris' droning 'Last Days' and Lopez's own deep and heavy 'Untitled 225' all prove to be especially rewarding. Recommended. 

The Milk Factory

Over fifty years ago, French composer Pierre Schaeffer, the father of musique concrète, described sound recording as ‘objet sonore’, suggesting that, while documenting a sonic event, it is also one. This is very much the philosophy behind the Sound Matter series of projects orchestrated by Spanish sound artist Francisco López. After Brussels in 2004, Montreal in 2006 and Victoriaville in 2007, López was invited to come to Birmingham and gather a handful of regional sound artists.

The concept behind the Sound Matter projects is pretty simple. Get a few sound artists together, send them to collect sounds from a particular city, let them process them as they see fit. These two sound pools are then a common platform for each of the artists involved to create their own work. Contributing to Birmingham Sound Matter are Helena Gough, Martin Clarke, Bobby Bird, Cormac Faulkner, Annie Mahtani, Mark Harris, Nicholas Bullen and Francisco López. The project started with a workshop held in early 2009, and the complete process, from the harvesting of sounds to the processing, composition and recording, took place during the following three months, with a concert, in Birmingham on 8 July bringing it to a close. This album, released on Audiobulb, documents the resulting work.

One artist who has worked on a similar project is Bobby Bird. In 2000, Bird, working as Higher Intelligence Agency, teamed up with Norwegian ambient artist Geir Jenssen, AKA Biosphere for Birmingham Frequencies, an album made using sounds collected around Birmingham. This followed a similar project three years before in Tromsø, Jenssen’s home town, during the Polar Music Festival, where the pair created music made exclusively from sounds sourced around the performing area. Here, he contributes Combustion, a piece which starts as a slow moving drone-like form, punctuated by regular pulses, but as Bird progressively brings grainy sounds and, eventually, almost industrial noises, his composition becomes denser and more organic.

Later, Annie Mahtani creates, with Shadows, a piece articulated around two very distinct sections. In the first one, she weaves light textures into much more robust and dense forms. Following a few seconds of silence, the more bucolic second part opens with bird songs, but the urban soundscape becomes increasingly vibrant and predominant, evoking the expansion of the city over the countryside, but Mahtani eventually returns to nature sounds to conclude. Opening electro acoustic composition Grau, by Helena Gough, is one of the most complex pieces presented here, as she arranges a series of segments into a narrative sequence which goes from peaceful and delicate to cold and mechanical, while Nicholas Bullen’s Proximity also goes through a number of phases, but, apart for a few white noise discharges, his are more tempered.

Others chose a more typically musical approach. This is the case of Mark Harris, whose Last Days focuses on long progressive drones which are given a soft orchestral feel, while crackles and statics are dusted over the latter part of the track. Drones are also fundamental to Martin Clarke’s piece. Using bell sounds, treated and stretched so they lose their percussive aspect but none of their rich tonal warmth, he offers here a surprisingly ethereal and exquisite moment with Sleep Birmingham Sleep. Concluding this album is Francisco López’s Untitled #225, which, along its ten minutes or so, builds from slow moving forms into much grander and more ambitious sound clouds as noises gather along the way.

Francisco López and his contributors don’t aim at building a sonic map of the city here, but use the noises and sounds it generates and turn them into particles that contribute to the overall work. This is, perhaps, more a representation of what cities are like, sprawling and ever changing. The result is particularly atmospheric and fascinating, as all artists share the same pool of sounds, yet each track is an utterly personal interpretation of it. In the hands of these, sound is, indeed a wonderful object.

Alt Sounds

"Right now heres a project for you Mr Lopez; grab some electronic artists, give them a few mic's and send them off into a city." That would be the voices in Spanish musical pioneer Francisco Lopez's head talking to him again. Oh no wait, it has happened, its been done. And here it is - "Birmingham Sound Matter" and it's collaboration of the weirdest, wonder-fullest, strangest, cl-ickiest, randomist sounds in one record, from Birmingham (of all places).

This concept is simple enough, but the content is a totally different kettle of fish cakes. You have to really understand what is going on before you can reach a conclusion to this latest release from Audiobulb. The Sheffield based independent label releases some of the most unique electronica to hit our playlists. "Birmingham Sound Matter" creates a compilation of sounds you wouldn't really pay any attention to in a normal setting. There are children playing, birds singing, bee's buzzing and cars wooshing past. 

Francisco Lopez seems to be a very complex individual; by talking about "reality" and all sorts of different mind sets (this is all on the CD sleeve, not in the music). This is definitely Exploratory music. The headline to the album is mental enough for me "Typically, recorded sound is considered as a representation of reality. Birmingham Sound Matter demonstrates that a sound recording can also be considered as an entity by itself." An entity itself? Sounds like David Icke has had his footing in the door for this one. 

Each track has had a different artist dip their musical wick into it. Layer by layer they must have had to tediously place each sound in a certain way, with a certain effect. 'Last Days" by Mark Harris sounds like the soundtrack to the film "Crash" with a warm ambient layer of synths and wobbly chords. Helana Gough's - 'Grau' has a glitch approach, with random bursts of scratchy energy and uncomfortable samples. I'm not quite sure what the hell she was sampling there!

This is music for the uber intellectual electronic music producer. It's just something that is so hard to understand, yet its magical in many ways. This is more like a soundtrack to a film really.

Igloo Magazine

Directed by the esteemed sound artist Francisco López, Birmingham Sound Matter is a compilation of recordings by a collection of artists from the Birmingham, Coventry and Black Country areas of the Midlands in England. Some were born there, some gravitated there from various locations around the UK and further afield.

The project is coordinated by Scylla Magda of Modulate, an experimental sound and visual arts project specializing in multi-speaker sound and visual arts events, who first met Lopez in 2007 when he visited the city for the first time to perform one of his legendary Total Darkness concerts at one of Modulate’s Sonic Culture Salon events. After that meeting Magda invited Lopez to direct a compilation project themed around the city. He accepted and Birmingham Sound Matter was born.

Lopez’s concept for the recording of this album is an interesting one. First, each of the artists compiled a pool of sounds they had recorded in and around the Birmingham area. Then, each of them took these recordings and treated, manipulated and processed them to create a second pool of mutated sounds. The respective artists were then free to use sounds from each pool to compose a new musical piece for the compilation. As Lopez quite rightly points out in the sleeve notes, this method of working means that each contribution is as much about the individual artist, if not more so, than it is about the city itself. 

Consisting mostly of droning soundscapes juxtaposed with field recordings of gentle environmental sounds such as birdsong or passing traffic, BSM is an intensely personal exploration of sound from all taking part. Helena Gough’s opener "Grau" starts with a low electrical hum interrupted with sudden sharp bursts of noise while Martin Clarke’s "Sleep Birmingham Sleep" builds from the calm simplicity of birdsong melting into traffic noise whilst all the time slowly building a radiant hypnotic drone. Higher Intelligence Agency’s Bobby Bird presents "Combustion," a carefully conceived track full of the haunting detail of a fire burning from the gentle beauty of its flames to its merciless destructive nature.

Changing tone somewhat is "Vortgeist" by Coventry’s Cormac Faulkner that opens with a deep aggressive drone that quickly dissolves into an agitated mix of intimate sounds, minute detail and tiny digital clicks. Annie Mahtani initially follows a similar theme with "Shadows" but soon develops it into a tale of a journey through the city complete with passing traffic, children playing and insects buzzing paired with sinister fuzzy layered drones. Her track could reflect the difference between night and day from the relative safety of the daylight hours to the potential danger any major city can bring after dark before the welcome dawn returns to start another day. 

Mark Harris opts for gentle orchestral tones over a steady undulating drone, providing a delightfully serene track that takes on a dark, sinister edge as the drone builds and becomes more prominent and distorted. Nicholas Bullen jars the senses abruptly at the start "Last Days" but offers a track that places tiny fragments of digital sound alongside processed field recordings that dissolve into an otherworldly mix of dark cavernous drones that echo and reverberate in deep underground chambers. Closing the album is project director Lopez’s own composition "Untitled #225," a track that features skillfully detailed sound, a harrowing tonal backing, the subtle rumble of subterranean drones and processed field recordings that twist, turn and evolve over the course of just under 10 minutes. 

Inevitably with something that uses a limited source material there is going to be some similarity between tracks but it is the way in which all the contributors use the material that is intriguing, all of them doing subtly different things and creating different moods, building different aural images and experimenting with different ways of presenting the material that is uniquely their own and distinctly personal to them.

BSM is a project focused on the artists involved and the concept more than just Britain’s second city itself. All of the artists are in some way connected to the region and this essentially brings the concept full circle in that it is reflected through the contributions each artist makes and the source material they use. Collectively, it is an intricately composed collection of related works, all intense, detailed, intimate and personal to those creating them. Essentially, this is a gallery of sound art from a group of like-minded artists collated with a clear vision of the finished product from Lopez. 

Textura

In a project overseen by experimental provocateur Francisco López, Birmingham Sound Matter presents evocative sound portraits of the locale filtered through the sensibilities of eight experimental artists. López, who regards the world as an infinitely rich sonic resource, takes his material from the natural and urban environments and then digitally assembles the treated results into provocative set-pieces. Last February, López and the seven collaborators made outdoor and indoor recordings around Birmingham in order to capture in sound the identity of the city, and then uploaded the materials to a shared internet space for the project participants to draw upon. As a result, despite obvious differences between the resultant pieces, a commonality is shared by them, which helps make the album feel like a unified statement rather than disjointed pieces. Some verge on hermetic and micro-sound in character, while others are more expansive and field recordings-oriented. Some exude a ghostly quality that suggests more of a deserted city than booming metropolis. Intermittently derailed by interference, Helena Gough's “Grau” embeds faintly audible natural and bird-like sounds within ghostly and whirring masses, while, in Martin Clarke's “Sleep Birmingham Sleep,” prominent field sounds of seagulls and bird chirps give way to traffic sounds of racing cars, thunder, and even sirens amidst a droning field of string tones. Bobby Bird's “Combustion” begins as a quieter, contemplative treatment but grows darker as watery sounds seep in, and then darker still as a menacing ambiance spreads like a virus. A nostalgic mood pervades the peaceful orchestral treatment Mark Harris brings to his beautifully modulated “Last Days,” with synthetic string tones augmented by static pops and a swelling bass undertow. A more brittle creature by comparison, Nicholas Bullen's “Proximity” shatters the calm induced by “Last Days” with a prickly stream of insectoid noises, ruptures, crow caws, and a crying baby. The natural ease with which the sound patterns flow into one another during Francisco López's “Untitled #225” evidences the producer's masterful handling of the elements, especially when a rather sub-lunar beginning eventually expands to become a rich swarm of simmering noise and dark tonal ambiance. Ultimately, as López himself accurately notes, “the results of this project are as much about Birmingham as about the participants themselves.” That is, the individual pieces occupy a middle ground between the imposition of a given individual creator's style and the deference shown by the artist in the desire to create a sonic portrait that would do justice to the locale. 

Neural IT

If the standard practice of sound recording is regarded as a "capture," then in this abstract conceptual electronic music project, the representation of auditory reality happens through far more complex perceptual mechanisms. The work considers frequencies and drones, intended as isolated particles, as entities that create other specific relations, whether of a generic nature or site-specific. The formula is as accurate as it is elementary: a select group of audio manipulators are sent samples from a particular city. Francisco López collects and coordinates the authors, who this time are all from Birmingham-UK. The record looks to explore the audio psychogeography of cities such as Brussels, Montreal and Victoriaville. The end result is fascinating, full of subtle textures, at first light, then denser - organic - as with Annie Mahtani's piece, or marked by harmonious reverberations, as in the  case of Mark Harris' elaborations, which are unraveled in elegant and hypnotic envelopes. Sounds of nature and dilated loops - fluctuating - are the basis of the formal application of Martin Clarke's offering, and, in a different but equally inspired way, the electro-acoustic music of Helena Gough peeps through the grooves. Bobby Bird,  Cormac Faulkner and Nicholas Bullen, too, are actively involved in the project, along with Francisco López himself, who performs last, an intense and intangible piece which leaves us with the image of a very dark and multifaceted metropolis.

Sound ProectorCompilation which recently has started on label Audiobulb Records is the new project of Francisco López, guru of such phenomenon as Musique Concrète. López's arrival to Birmingham in 2007 can be considered the start of it, there he was giving one of his 'Total Darkness' concerts. Later the musician decided to return, he gathered a group of British musicians and proposed them all to record sounds inside Birmingham. After a definite number of records was gathered, all members of the project together with project's director made of them 8 long-lasting compositions which absorbed the spirit of the idea that sound is not projection of some reality, it's self-sufficient, and can be considered as an entity by itself. All that was received in the result can be called by fans of classifications as "non-music". In general, rather amusing notion. What is music and what not? Birds' singing and cars' noise in the track of Martin Clarke or the sound of water in the work by Bobby Bird as for me belong to music more than that what is poured out on us by the surface of musical industry.

All material recorded in Birmingham was scrupulously arranged by the musicians. They add their own elements to the composition to their taste, most often it's dense, low-frequency drone or canvas of vast ambient sounds. Here one can notice not banal mixture of tracks with field records but the work with this material. Like an artist works with oil paints, and sculptor with pieces of clay. You think at once that it's something like "abstraction"...If you play the disc like a background, well, it will be so, but listening attentively you notice the complicated structure and rich images. You notice that what can't be found in pop music, and people are free-tongued to call pop music "music"...

Vital Weekly

BIRMINGHAM SOUND MATTER (CD by Audiobulb) Recently an interesting book was published by Thomas Bey William Bailey called 'Microbionic' about 'radical electronic music and sound art in the 21st century'. If you want to know why people do what they do, the likes of Ryoji Ikeda, Peter Rehberg, Merzbow then this is a highly recommended read. Also featured is a piece on Francisco Lopez. His music doesn't have a story - Absolute Music he calls it - no message, politically, but he wants the listener to listen to sound. Lopez is probably a fine teacher, as in Birmingham he did another project in his Sound Matter series. First Montreal (see Vital Weekly 537) and now Birmingham. Lopez, along with participants went out to record sounds in the city and then throw them into a soundpool and each was to process them, together and alone, and from that even more extended soundpool, composers picked the sounds to work with. Unlike Montreal, I have not been to Birmingham, but I imagine a city with some high buildings and some nice parks. From whatever sound we hear in place here, we hear birds and cars, all immersed in heavily electronic processing. The participants are self-taught or academic, and we recognize the names of Helena Gough and Nicholas Bullen among them, but all of them seemed to have the lessons from the master himself in transforming sounds and composing with the results. None of them seem to be inspired that much by the Lopezian silence treatments of yesteryear, but they are all present and correct. Mark Harris is the only one who plays a piece that is closely to 'real' music, with an underlying melodic form. Also included are Martin Clarke, Bobby Bird, Cormac Faulkner, Annie Mahtani and solo piece by Lopez, who isn't that 'silent' either these days. A fine work.