Auf Room40 erscheint in Kürze und rund fünfzehn Jahre nach der Erstveröffentlichung eine digitale Edition von “Apsomeophone”, dem zweiten Album von David Browns Candlesnuffer-Projekt. David Michael Brown, der bereits seit den 70ern in diversen Bands spielt, zählt zum Kern der experimentellen Musikszene Melbournes und ist auch heute, rund zehn Jahre seit den letzten Candlesnuffer-Veröffentlichungen, in verschiedenen Projekten wie den Punkjazzern Bucketrider oder dem Duo Terminal Hz mit KK Null aktiv. “Apsomeophone” dankt im Hinblick auf seine Ausarbeitung einiges der freien Improvisation. Inspiriert wurde die Musik aber primär von ausgewählten Arbeiten der Musique Concréte, namentlich Béla Bartók, John Cage, Pierre Henry, György Ligeti, Tōru Takemitsu and Edgard Varése. Motive dieser Komponisten wurden mittels Gitarren, Stimme, ein paar Pedalen und wenigen Bearbeitungsschritten in einen neuen Zusammenhang transponiert. Eine Vinyl-Edition existiert ebenfalls.
“‘apsomeophone’ grew out of love for and, from a listener’s point of view, an historical immersion in a tight group of compositions by musique concréte, film soundtrack and Twentieth Century Classical composers. These listening experiences became entwined, at some stage, with my own ponderings round a desire to compose a group of very personally suited recordings, to be utilised in a live context as a proxy ensemble accompaniment to my slowly blossoming and evolving prepared guitar techniques. Through a compositional process that I would loosely describe as ‘aural sculpture’, I extracted snippets of sound and short musical passages from these adored compositions (the list of composers borrowed from includes Béla Bartók, John Cage, Pierre Henry, György Ligeti, Tōru Takemitsu and Edgard Varése). These small sonic extractions I then processed heavily, augmented spatially and timbrally and began to arrange into fragmented groupings, making correlations pleasing to my ear.
This transfigurative process became a long drawn out undertaking, soon enriched and complicated by the systematic and responsive addition of other fragmentary sounds generated through the use of my own guitars, stringed instruments and electronics. And…., on the layering and editing went as I meandered towards a final point of sonic sculptural satisfaction. As a group of odes, each of the final compositions on ‘apsomeophone’ focuses on one or two of the aforementioned, inspirational listening antecedents. Fifteen years later, the compositions throughout ‘apsomeophone’ still hold a warm grip on me and, though distant timewise, I still feel saturated with all the minutiae of the compositional processes, a feeling akin to being immersed in a supportive body of warm water. It’s a record that I’m really attached to and remain entwined with to the point where the working methods which gestated there have become the norm for me. It’s a heavily pored over record, where somehow nothing is out of place, and I believe it’s a record loosely in the mode of its predecessors.” (David Brown)