Simon Scott mit Klangstudie über die ostenglischen Fens

Der englische Soundartist Simon Scott, der neben seinen Soloarbeiten auch als Drummer von Slowdive bekannt ist, bringt in Kürze ein neues Album auf Room40 heraus. “Long Drove” ist eine intrikate Klangstudie über den titelgebenden Ort, eine Art Pfad, die zwischen zwei Naturschutzgebieten in den ostenglischen Sumpfgebieten nahe Cambridge entlangführt. “Long Drove is a site-specific sound study which shifts the Anthropocene discourse from spectatorship to musical participation, accountability, and creative engagement” heißt es seitens des Labels. “The near future of the Fens, with concerns of further subsidence and threat of flooding, remains a palpable concern. One can almost hear Scott’s thought processes within these five compositions, of what the Fens would sound like if submerged and flooded by water again, returning to its original marshland state as a result of climate change, as the field recordings dissipate and unfurl with melancholic washes of decaying tape loops and digitally processed textures of Fenland sonorities”. Scott erweist sich in diesen Arbeiten als ein konzentrierter Beobachter der räumlichen Gegebenheiten und überlässt kaum Schritte dem Zufall.

Am Anfang steht jedoch immer das persönliche Verbundensein mit den Orten: “I regularly visit the remote and nameless broken bridge, that is situated over a long drainage ditch that connects Holme Fen and New Decoy nature reserves, simply to listen. Each season I’d return to observe the sonorities of wildlife merge and coalesce with the hum of the long telephone wires that stretch across the wide and flat Fens. Within my audition I’d perceive different sonic characteristics within the same location and I soon began to record its vast polyphonic glory. By pure serendipity my water bottle accidentally struck the steel bridge, and it rang out like a gong across the Fen landscape. This inspired me to use soft mallet beaters to actually play the bridge as a percussive musical instrument and capture its resonant qualities. A subsequent desire was also to place my tiny DPA microphones inside one of the bridge vertical openings to act as a filter of the many sonorities within and outside of the metal bridge. The vibratory aural qualities of the bridge would differ depending on what part of the bridge I struck and what season it was”. Das Album erscheint am 20. Januar als CD und zum Download.

@ Discogs