Nick Storring: Newfoundout
mappa
The cover elements of Newfoundout look how the recording sounds. Undulating shapes of undefinable character blur and bleed together, the whole forming some swampy convulsion of colour and ooze. Consistent with that, the sounds on Nick Storring's seventh album feel as if they're crawling out of primordial sludge, and conventional figure-ground distinctions are forsaken for restlessly shape-shifting phantasmagorias packed with allusive detail. Even the inner sleeve's typography is destabilized: words flow as they would appear if submerged underwater.
The Toronto-based composer named the recording's seven settings after “ghost towns around Ontario,” and certainly there is a phantom-like elusiveness to the material. Newfoundout was created using acoustic and electromechanical instruments, but few assert their identities directly or clearly. The press release cites a tunable dog whistle and Storring's expired driver's license as two sound sources, which should give you some sense of the sonic universe the album inhabits. That said, not every sound is unconventional: ones generated by bells, drums, and other percussion instruments surface, and occasionally something akin to a straightforward melody or rhythm pattern emerges too. The press release also accurately notes that the pieces are less predicated on narrative direction and more on articulating a sound space wherein elements meander. Metamorphosis is omnipresent, with changes transpiring patiently and organically.
While the pieces exude a common sensibility, there are differences between them. As “Dome” develops, it veers into quasi-gamelan territory, if tangentially. A propulsive beat pattern lends “Dome Extension” drive and definition when it arises alongside engulfing flurries of vocal and wind effects. Animated too are “Frood” and “Vroomanton,” which could pass for live improvs by a junk percussion ensemble (the latter even flirts with techno, house, and electronica during its second half). Rhodes sprinkles give “Khartum” a hint of ‘70s jazz before the piece transitions into a spiritual jazz-styled episode that briefly calls Alice Coltrane to mind. Par for the course, however, “Khartum” never sits still for long and morphs into a spectral exercise in creeping time-suspension. At album's end, one final twist occurs when an orchestral-styled display in the brooding title track appears alongside gamelan and electric piano flourishes.
Storring's appetite for experimentation and exploration is at its height during “Silver Centre,” which whistles, creaks, and flutters for fourteen woozy minutes. During one striking passage, patterns that might have been produced by accordion and didgeridoo collide before bell strikes reintroduce a gamelan tone. Continuing its changing shape, the piece eventually swells into a nightmarish mass that plays like a harrowing plummet down a mine shaft. If Storring's previous full-length My Magic Dreams Have Lost Their Spell was idiosyncratic, Newfoundout takes that to a further extreme. The pieces tease at definition but resist doing so, opting for inscrutability instead. That makes for a listening experience that's less frustrating than fascinating when one grapples with possible meanings at every moment. If ever an album merited the label hallucinatory, it's this one.October 2021