Gregory Büttner: Voll.Halb.Langsam.Halt
Gruenrekorder

Michael Lightborne: Sounds of the Projection Box
Gruenrekorder

Eisuke Yanagisawa: Path of the Wind
Gruenrekorder

Every six months or so, new items appear on Lasse-Marc Riek and Roland Etzin's Gruenrekorder imprint that present innovative treatments of field recordings-based work. Three recent projects exemplify the imaginative sensibilities artists bring to the label's output, in this case releases by Eisuke Yanagisawa, Gregory Büttner, and Michael Lightborne (all three are available in digital form, the first two also as CDs and Lightborne's in vinyl). As an indication of the breadth of the label's projects, Yanagisawa's Path of the Wind focuses on sounds generated by the Aeolian Harp, a string instrument ‘played' by nature, whereas Lightborne's Sounds of the Projection Box has to do with ambient sounds originating from UK-based cinema projection booths. Each of the three releases fascinates in different ways.

The forty-one-minute release by Yanagisawa, an ethnographer, field recordist, university professor, and filmmaker based in Kyoto, provides a remarkable illustration of the music-generating capacity of a natural element, in this instance wind. To explore the phenomenon, he first built a small Aeolian Harp using materials from a local store and then brought it outside to test it out; when no sound resulted, he adjusted the string materials and tension until a better outcome was achieved (two microphones were also adjoined to the harp to record the sounds produced). Delicate harmonic textures are generated that modify according to alterations in wind direction, strength, and consistency.

Based on unprocessed field recordings recorded between 2014 and 2017 in different parts of Japan, Path of the Wind presents seven settings of subtly contrasting character. When the harp interacts with the surrounding area, it becomes a transducer in the way it picks up environmental sounds; in the opening piece, for example, the reverberant, hollowed-out tones of the harp merge with low-pitched shimmer and warble originating from nearby ferries passing each other. When in the subsequent track the piercing cry of a seagull appears amidst the mutating drone of the harp recording and the sound of waves crashing ashore, it can't help but startle. In general, the wind tones produce a sound reminiscent of the ebbing-and-flowing hum of electrical wires, which makes for a stark contrast when heard alongside the burble of a water source or bird cry; the final setting, “Kinshozan,” even introduces an eerie, sci-fi dimension to the release, despite the fact that the title refers to a small mountain and the tiny clattering sounds derive from drilling at a nearby mine. Yanagisawa's sound portraits are sometimes so lulling, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that much of what's presented are undoctored documents of nature's handiwork.

Hamburg-based sound artist Gregory Büttner used two contact mics to gather the base material for his long-form, thirty-six-minute composition Voll.Halb.Langsam.Halt. The raw sounds were collected when he took a trip in 2010 on an old icebreaker traveling from Rostock to Rügen over the Baltic Sea. With the ship's body completely built from metal, it lent itself especially well to the project when different areas on the boat generated sounds different from anywhere else; Büttner even sourced recordings from the coal-fired steam engine. In constructing the soundscape, he used juxtapositions, transitions, and cuts but didn't apply any additional sound manipulations; the detail's worth noting as it makes the result all the more striking for the way he shaped the material into a piece that, while heavily percussive in nature, plays more like a musical work than field recording.

In the sound design aspect, metallic timbres and ambient noises dominate, whereas rhythm structures emerge when hydraulic elements, clicks, rustlings, bells, and engine noises are shaped into beat-like formations. Layers of repeating cells unite to create the impression of an insistent, propulsive rhythm machine that resembles in certain moments the collective tick-tocking of multiple timepieces. Though it's presented as a single-track piece, Voll.Halb.Langsam.Halt does advance through multiple parts; still, while discernible shifts in character are audible, transitions never occur so abruptly they prove jarring. One comes away from the work appreciating it as a creation of rhythmically focused yet nonetheless musical character ingeniously assembled by Büttner from non-musical sources.

A professor in the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick who's currently working on a book about cinema-related environments and location sound recording, Lightborne is certainly qualified to tackle the topic of cinema projection boxes. His release, which documents the transition from 35mm to digital within the projection booth, grew out of sound recordings he began making in early 2016. By the time his fieldwork started, the majority of UK cinemas had become digital only, which made Lightborne's desire to capture the sounds of analogue projection booths an undertaking of considerable value. Of course, the setting is so carefully enclosed it ensures that most of the sounds occurring within it are unknown to the viewing audience, which makes it easy to forget that it's the critical center of the cinematic experience. For that reason and others, Sounds of the Projection Box proves illuminating. Be aware that it is a field recordings-based work in the truest sense, with nothing added in post-production (e.g., musical elements) to make it more accessible.

Side one documents the cinema-based assembly of a film from smaller reels through to projection before an audience and eventual disassembly, the reference to “The Thing” not to the equipment involved but to John Carpenter's 1981 opus, the film used in this instance to illustrate the stages. In the opening piece, machine noises of various kinds appear along with the whirr of a film spooling, muffled snippets of conversation, and even fragments of music. The splicing together of the smaller reels is heard during “Making Up the Thing,” where myriad tape noises and rustlings emerge alongside the rickety, techno-like pulse of a mechanical rewinder, after which the film, having been projected, is reduced to smaller reels that are then sent back to the distributor. On the second side, other cinema locations are represented, namely the Electric cinema in Birmingham, the Rio in Dalston, and the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds. “Hyde Park Electromagnetic” is marked by the unusual electronic-styled sounds generated by conventional microphones plus contact and electromagnetic coil mics, whereas field, contact, and electromagnetic mics document the sound of a reel spinning furiously at the Electric. Traces of the 1940 Will Hay comedy Where's That Fire? are audible in “The Electric,” which was recorded at the same cinema in the company of projectionist Sam Bishop. At album's end, “Digital Light” shifts the focus from manually operated equipment to the digital projector, which, because its workings are largely concealed, doesn't allow for the kind of tinkering projectionists bring to analogue equipment. Using an electromagnetic coil microphone, Lightborne was able to make audible the sonic life of the digital ‘black box,' resulting in, not surprisingly, the most electronic and synthetic-sounding track of the album's ten.

November 2018