tom recchion
"I was struck by the cacophony of sounds at the dawn of light in the 'suburb' of Oaxaca where I was staying. It woke me everyday of my week long stay. It was like a barnyard turned up to 11. I brought a DAT machine and two Audio Technica microphones for the purpose of making field recordings on the trip. I woke up before the sun came up and set up the equipment in the dark. The first sound on the record is the moment the sun came over the horizon.
This beautiful LP features site-specific recordings and photographs by Tom Recchion, a sound and visual artist/composer/potter/art director and graphic designer. He is the co-founder of the legendary Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) and has been an active, integral participant in the arts for more than forty years. Recchion lives in Pasadena, California.
This shortish release is the result of Tom Recchion's ability in seizing the acoustic marrow of two definite moments of his life. Being these tracks constructed upon unprocessed field recordings, it is obvious from the beginning that the misshapen identities and ectoplasmic sonorities typical of Recchion's loop-based output are not in attendance in this case. The adjectives used in the liner notes for this material: "raw, unadulterated and unpretentious" look perfectly OK to categorize it.
oaxaca dawn | bamboo
(eeaoa032) picture disc LP
Elevator Bath's ongoing series of picture disc LPs (each record being adorned with full-color artwork by the recording artist) continues with Tom Recchion's lovely Oaxaca Dawn | Bamboo. Originally slated for release nearly ten years ago, this pair of humble field recordings is now finally available.
Oaxaca Dawn and Bamboo are two raw, unadulterated, and unpretentious snapshots of specific moments in time and space: the early morning cracking of dawn in Oaxaca, Mexico and a windy afternoon in a Hana bamboo forest on Maui, Hawaii. Individually these audio documents are gorgeously simple, matter-of-fact presentations of travels. Together they are a recollection of their natural beauty, impossible to adequately render by any other means.
The bamboo forests on Maui were seared into my memory from my first time in Hawaii. On my second trip, armed with a first edition Edirol digital recorder, I hung out in the forest for a couple of hours to make the recordings. I noticed 3 distinct sounds (though there are more). The wood block clunking of the stocks, the squeaking of the thin branches flicking and slipping off neighboring plants and the white noise rustling of the leaves on top of the giant clusters."
This picture disc LP has been released in an edition of 250 copies. Every copy purchased directly from Elevator Bath will include a download code for high quality files of the entire audio content of this LP.
Track list:
In such a kind of offer we are not looking for anything but a link to our own experience as deep listeners. Both pieces work very well in that sense. The incomparable animal counterpoint of "Oaxaca Dawn" rises from a quietly buzzing atmosphere that nevertheless seems to slightly increase its pressure level with the elapsing of time. The hissing leaves and irregular clattering of "Bamboo" appear as the carving of silence by the wooden core of mother nature. Any smell of holiday brochure is kept at safe distance as one enjoys the heartwarming traits of soundscapes comprising a number of familiar rural echoes. Without intellectual components blemishing the overall purity, there are no impediments for sharing less than 30 minutes of someone else's corroborating loneliness inside diverse environmental settings.
- Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes
Tom Recchion has had a release on this label before (see Vital Weekly 841), and he is best known for his older music within the Los Angeles Free Music Society, as well as playing with David Toop, Christian Marclay, Oren Ambarchi and designing record covers for recently deceased pop stars, and probably some still alive. Here we have two distinctly different pieces, which Recchion calls 'unpretentious snapshots of specific moments in time and space'. The first piece is called 'Oaxaca dawn' and was recorded in the place of the same name in Mexico at the cracking of dawn while 'Bamboo' was recorded in the (windy) afternoon in in Hana bamboo forest on Maui in Hawaii. On the first piece we hear a lot of animal sounds, dogs, hens, chickens, birds and insects and whatever else lives around farms, all of which seem to be heavily amplified and makes up a densely woven field of animal sounds, which is highly captivating to hear. Hard to say if any editing took place here, but it might very well. The bamboo forest recording on the other side is compared to that quite 'mellow' with lots of rustling of branches of the bamboo, other leaves of plants in the vicinity and what could be wind, which here sounds like white noise. It sounds like a record capturing dust and which has no music. Here too I think it all sounds highly captivating, like hearing some highly obscured action-taking place, but then entirely triggered by non-human and non-animal action. These are two beautiful examples of field recordings.
- Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly