Birchville Cat Motel: With Maples Ablaze
Scarcelight Recordings

On With Maples Ablaze, two dozen members add distinctive noises to New Zealander Campbell Kneale's “junk, field recordings, baby monitors, and percussion” on this 70-minute, episodic travelogue through ten untitled tracks. Contributors include Bill Wood, Jan Anderzen, and Peter Wright on guitars, violinist Antony Milton, and drummers Stefan Neville and Peter Stapleton, plus electronics from Rosy Parlane, Ralf Wehowsky, John Weise, and Rob Hayler, and field recordings from Richard Francis and Glenn Donaldson (not to mention Bruce Russell on, ahem, fire, Kohei Nakagawa on boiling water and shibaki electronics, and Kuwayama Kiyoharu on metal). Given such a large pool, one perhaps anticipates a dense and cluttered result, but in fact Kneale integrates their contributions restrainedly, allowing ample wind to blow through these spacious, panoramic soundscapes (one exception, though, the humungous drone that emerges midway through). Kneale solicited material from the participants—many fellow New Zealanders, it turns out—and then meticulously wove their sounds into an extremely personalized sonic fabric.

While With Maples Ablaze might be formally classified a drone piece, there's nothing unvarying or one-dimensional about it, even if a core pulse is never too far from the surface; indeed, there's an evolving soft-loud-soft trajectory that's easily discerned. The initial stages are relatively peaceful—an ambient overture of cloudy swirls, industrial rustlings, and bluesy guitar scrapings, followed by a mutating drone of bell tinklings and machine din—with an array of string scrapings and field noises in the fourth section that strongly resembles the aural psycho-geography inhabited by Set Fire To Flames. This haunted episode of dreamier guitar ruminations turns noisier when machine-like rumbles grow into an avalanche of train track clatter and industrial clamor. The album's climax appears in the sixth section where warped voice babble escalates into a hellish cacophony, with razor tones sometimes piercing too painfully. In its last third, the piece quietens, the focus shifting to distant wind rumblings and glistening, string- and organ-heavy drones that dramatically arch and swoop. Like a fully alive organism, a natural aura pervades the work, as it seems to stretch across broad, sometimes desolate vistas. And organic is the key word, as Kneale encourages the material to develop and unfold in unhurried rather than forced manner.

February 2005