Natural History comprises ten tracks running to 49 minutes. The music uses a combination of found metals, plastics, glass, wood and field recordings.
The work began by recording materials in a large resonant concrete interior. Metals in the form of saw blades, alarm bells, coiled springs, steel stands, metal conduit, wire mesh and Chinese cymbals were struck, swung and dragged in the space to capture the unique sound character of materials in motion. A variety of other metals were thrown and bounced about the space, and glass bottles were smashed. A small improvised horn with a flexible tube was played whilst whirling the tube. A long length of plastic cable was similarly whirled, as was a bull roarer. Large wooden laths were dropped and dragged in the space.
Other recordings were made in large concrete walled, wooden floored interiors. This involved dragging steel frame plastic chairs and trestle tables to generate drones. Timpani mallets were used on floating inflated plastics. Metals were recorded in studio, struck and bowed. All recordings were edited and pitch-shifted to draw out latent harmonic content.
I had recently made field recordings around various building sites in Dublin, which were edited and stitched into one track (Malign Alignment). I've always been drawn to the sound character of these sites with their sundry drones, clangs and thumps that are amplified and filtered by the highly reflective nature of the unfinished concrete interiors. To me, it's a form of random percussion on an industrial scale.
Delving deep in the field recording archive to add more sound colour and acoustic dimension to the compositions, percussion in the form of wing beats, fireworks, church bells, sheep bells, rain and struck metal fences were added. The time in development, from source recordings and edits to final compositions is approximately 6 – 8 months.
A necessary part of this process, near the end, where the editing tweaks and revisions get smaller and smaller and more and more critical, is to stand back from the work for a week or two and return to it with fresh ears and a clearer perspective. The work has to sit and settle for a good while before I become fully comfortable with it, and I get to a point where I feel it needs no further development.
The last element of the music is the sequencing of tracks. This is essential to the album's pacing and general developmental arc. How the tracks sit in relation to each other, and influence the listener's perception of them – a vital final edit.
It's often the case at this stage that I'll have no clue about titles and artwork, but it comes. It always does. I keep a notebook of words and phrases I encounter in various contexts – mostly reading – and these can be pressed into service when the time is right. The music is never illustrative, so the titles aren't either. But they have an inscrutable logic that fits the music and become part of its identity; a sealing-in or framing - the music is heard through that reference point and whatever it suggests to the listener. It becomes the work, the work becomes it.
Sources:
Future Leakage - Saw blades, whirled cable, whirled horn, telephone bells.
Ornamental Stagnation – Manhole cover, steel conduit, steel cage, whirled cable, brass discs, spinning tops, bowed telephone bells, wildlife recordings (Iceland), dragged table, steamroller, wire fence (contact mic rec), waste water treatment plant recording.
Malign Alignment – Glass bottles, bounced metals, dragged chair, whirled cable, building site recordings.
Lingering Indigo – Saw blades, telephone bells, large wooden lath, dragged chair, dragged spring, timpani mallets on inflated plastic, bounced metals.
District Encircled – Large steel plate, barrier stand bases, dragged chair, whirled horn, passing plane and St. Anne's church bell, Limehouse, London, starlings and magpies in back garden, large wall-mounted radiator (Collins Barracks, Dublin), bowed & struck metals.
Dreadnought – Dragged table, bowed metals, Chinese cymbals, barrier stand bases, wood-on-wood friction, fireworks, whirled cable, whirled horn.
Necrotic Narcotic – Glass bottles, large & small steel plates, dragged chair, pigeons.
Widescreen – Dragged table, steel gate, passing plane, large steel tube, Dortmund church bells, Manchester tram, Madrid sheep bells, bowed car springs, dragged chairs, rain on metal, Antibes jetty underside, steel bell (Collins Barracks, Dublin).
Blemished Emblem– Metals, large wall mounted radiator (Collins Barracks, Dublin), dragged chair, steel fence.
Elliptic – Struck metal fence, barrier stand bases, rubber mallets on steel fence, rain.
"Fergus Kelly is one of those mavericks of sound that will both never cease to amaze you with how much you can get out of different materials that have different acoustic and percussive qualities and a sensitivity and well-rounded taste in terms of post-processing.
What we are getting here as a listener is an epic narrative where you travel the urban environment in a psychogeographical way, exploring everything that comes along with the craftsman musician who has experimented with a variety of tones and multitude of percussive possibilities. He has gone through them very carefully and has appreciated, studied every single bit of those to create a novella of urban exploration with added value of field recordings which blend extremely well with all the sounds.
Natural History is both illustrative and acts as a quality of its own - a tale of debris, astonishment and horror. The undertones of a post-industrial survey across the places which are usually not seen as something relevant. The source he is feeding his ideas from seems like an inexhaustible well, and I would love to see how it will unfold in the future."
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