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HAYNES, JIM - Kamchatka

Format: CD-R Label & Cat.Number: Contour Editions ce.cd_0003 Release Year: 2012 Note: JIM HAYNES mysterious "elemental drones" on Kamchatka are derived from recordings of rocks, hills & plains in combination with a live soundtrack to a film by PAUL CLIPSON; lim. /numb.150 copies, oversized cardboard / art cover , 'printed utilizing archival pigment ink on strathmore paper'; on the new label from RICHARD GARET, New York Price (incl. 19% VAT): €13.00 Warning: Currently we do not have this album in stock! More Info "If an art of reason is the death of the experiential and subsequently the death of the poetics, like Jean-François Lyotard states, there is no cold reasoning with Jim's work but in fact the denial of it completely, however, instead we find much to experience and much to feel emotionally, physically, and psychologically. Perhaps in this particular case the only conceptual reasoning goes into the fictional, the science fiction phenomena, the imagination, and the wondering that went into interpreting from the distance what Kamchatka meant to Mr. Haynes. That approach to sound art and composing is rarely seen these days within the world of music and sound, it somewhat brings back hints of what the romantic painters were about, for example when Gustave Moreau painted from the imagination and from interpreting the work of symbolic writers or like when Eugène Delacroix was illustrating his subjects evoking powerful responses through coloring and movement. Regardless, these two compositions comprise the typical elements expected in Haynes work such as textures, timber and pitch, obscure field recordings, crackles and pops, soft hisses of background noise, and all masterly established throughout an elaborated multilayered construct. But the psychological strength to these pieces emerges from the powerful illustration of the absent, the unphysical, the distant, the abstraction that depicts the unknown, shaping itself through sonic particles established by the fictional interpretation of the subject matter that sonically shapes an impenetrable environment. And in this case, like Kafka's Metamorphosis, Haynes draws attention to transformation, to horror, to the unknown that is about to burst and throw us over the edge." [Richard Garet, 2012] www.contoureditions.com "Thought to be long gone, we managed to get a handful more of these super limited edition discs by our very own Jim Haynes - dronologist, soundscaper, recorder of rusting metal! These two pieces both represent impressions of Kamchatka, a Russian province often referred to as the "Siberia of Siberia", which speaks to its utter isolation, which Haynes manages to evoke magnificently in the opening track "Lilith", which is a 21 minute sprawl of intercepted shortwave broadcasts, captured and reworked into brittle buzzing textures, swirling masses of crumbling sonic shimmer, and deep morasses of subterranean rumble, the sky full of tinkling chimes and blurred static, beneath it fragmented melodies drift below the surface of a tranquil sonic sea. The track seemingly drifts between two extremes, thick layered dronescapes, and spare stretches of Geiger counter like chitter, those sparse passages draped over what sounds like field recordings of boats rubbing against docks, the clatter of oars, or perhaps the slow decay of nature. Somehow these mysterious purloined sounds are captured and recontextualized as a strange field of scrape and rumble, of creak and groan, all beneath soft focus billows of distant shimmer, and those skittery Raster-Noton cricket-like chirps. Haunting and ominous, the track finally seeming to blossom into the blurred bleary final movement, an ethereal wash of blissful thrum and strangely, an almost aquatic shimmer, that evokes images of some placid body of water, surrounded by miles and miles of emptiness. The second track, "Rocks Hills Plains", a slightly reworked version of a soundtrack Haynes performed for a film by Paul Clipson at the ATA in 2008, seems culled from the same source material, opening with a gauzy cloud of static, over a softly undulating sea of low end rumble, and continues in a similar manner, all of the rough edges and more clattery elements of the first piece here, smoothed into a swoonsome sprawl of hushed murky mesmer, haunting and cinematic, the sounds creeping and oozing ominously, until the begin to recede, leaving in the foreground a field of softly percussive scrabbling, sounding like strange ghostly rubbings against the microphone, those sounds slowly growing more ethereal and soon transforming into still more cloudy shimmer. Eventually, the sound of the whole track begins to coalesce into something much more pure tone, seeming to shed any vestiges of the low fidelity with about 7 minutes to go, the sound building to something softly caustic, with some serious sonic heft, on the recording it's still comparatively quite, but live through the proper sound system, it's easy to imagine the sort of sonic energy this passage might emit, lush and layered and darkly dense, a powerful (but still minimal) coda, which quickly subsides, winding down as a barely there bit of ambient thrum, laced with disembodied field recordings, a hushed outro that quickly becomes silence. LIMITED TO 150 COPIES. Each one hand numbered, housed in super swank, archivally printed, oversized 6 panel sleeves." [Aquarius Records]