jim haynes
"The album was mostly composed, recorded, and sketched during an Estonian residency at MoKS for a program that was hosted by Simon Whetham and John Grzinich called Active Crossover. The goal of that program was to bring together various artists whose work pertained directly or indirectly to environmental recordings. When John asked me about what kinds of spaces I was interested in seeking out before I arrived, I mentioned that I would like to investigate sites that had a considerable amount of electro-magnetic disruption which I could capture on radio along with sites of psychic distress.
Based in California, Jim Haynes has exhibited internationally at the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art, the Lausanne Underground Film Festival, the Berkeley Art Museum, WestSpace (Melbourne, Australia), and Diapason (New York). Recorded media has been published through Editions Mego, Ghostly International, Drone Records, Hooker Vision, Intransitive, Semperflorens, Elevator Bath, and The Helen Scarsdale Agency. He has also been awarded residencies at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (California), Recombinant Media Labs (California), Jack Straw Productions (Seattle), and MoKS (Estonia). He has participated in a number of fruitful collaborations with Loren Chasse, Keith Evans, Steven Stapleton, and M.S. Waldron. Until 2015, Haynes was the Vice President and Curatorial Director for 23five Incorporated, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the development and increased awareness of sound arts within the public arena. He is also the lone occupant at The Helen Scarsdale Agency.
The foreign lands mentioned in title might be just one land, and that's Estonia, and Jim Haynes
was invited for a residency at MoKS in that country, hosted by Simon Whetham and John Grzinich,
for people working directly or indirectly with field recordings. And that is surely something that is
Haynes' alley. Whereas from much of his previous output one could have the idea that Haynes is
another drone meister, transforming lengthy chunks of sound into long form pieces of drone
music, it seems that in more recent times Haynes ventures out to the world of musique concrete.
The recordings he taped in abandoned, crumbling old soviet buildings owe more to the world of
acoustic sounds, with contact microphones scraping over concrete floors and the crackling of
faulty electricity wires, which are cut, edited, pasted, looped and refined on tape (well, more likely
to be a computer these days) in the form of a collage, cutting sounds in and out of the mix. Some
of this gets layered and thus a drone might formed, but just as easily it's all a wild collage of sound;
Haynes is no longer the drone merchant pur sang, but as noted with his previous release,
'Scarlet' (Vital Weekly 970), his current work is more along the lines of Francesco Meirino or Joe
Colley, with a few surprise jump cuts thrown for that all sudden wake-up call. The first side as
three of these collages of field recordings and they work very well. From the prolonged crackling
of streetcars, piled up together, to the electrical current flickering in an empty space. It is all from
the haunted house, I guess, and it simply is made with great care.
The second side has a side long piece, 'Electric Speech: Nadiya' and is cut-up of voice material,
that is very much like Nurse With Wound's own studio play book, but Haynes also mentions Robert
Ashley's 'Purposeful Lady Slow' as a point of reference. Below the chopped up voice there is quite
a bit of electronics and short wave sounds and the reversing of sound for that extra spooky or
surreal (cross out what you don't like) effect. There is no text that could be deciphered in anyway,
but it has a real classical musique concrete feel to it. This is an excellent piece of music that, in all
its nineteen minutes is full of tension and creepiness and which makes one on the edge of the seat.
I thought this was one excellent record; probably the best work by Haynes so far, who seems to be
maturing with every new release.
flammable materials from foreign lands
(eeaoa045) LP
The new LP from Jim Haynes is a haunted and provocative endeavor, rust-covered and mysterious. It is the result of an immersive listening/recording process through which Haynes' singular techniques intersected with an unfamiliar, disquieting landscape....
The Estonian landscape is pocked with abandoned buildings of considerable size and decay. Many of the excursions for Active Crossover engaged the large crumbling Soviet-era structures. Given that the electricity was off in many of these sites, I had to rely on shortwave to capture any electro-magnetic disruptions instead of any fluctuations from shitty wiring or weird Soviet power transformers... and the radio reception from that particular time and that particular place (i.e. southeastern Estonia) was eerie and unsettled. The crackle, drone, and noise is unlike that which is heard in the United States, looming with a (possibly perceived) paranoia of the Russian state just a few kilometers away. That said, Estonia had experienced an encroachment from Russia as the Russian military kidnapped/extradited an Estonian intelligence officer who was on Estonian soil at the time not too far from where I was staying. Given the contemporary military actions of Russia reclaiming Crimea from Ukraine, this incident put many an Estonian on edge.
The A-side to Flammable Materials reflects this aestheticized paranoia through bursts of static, pulsed noise, and atonal sinews of sustained frequency. The B-side is wholly more introspective, cutting up an Estonian radio broadcast into phonemes, disjointed phrases, and cryptic speech. What few words that can be recognized from the Estonian pertain to the forces of globalization. From the context of someone who understands very little of the language, these snippets of a female voice clip like a surrealist collage or a Dada poem. Compositionally, I was thinking very much of Robert Ashley's Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon and the Nurse With Wound recontextualization of such sounds."
- Jim Haynes
Flammable Materials from Foreign Lands has been issued as a clear vinyl LP with gorgeous matte-finish jackets featuring artwork by Jim Haynes. Mastered by James Plotkin, it has been released in a limited edition of 300 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.
Total running time: 38 minutes
Track list:
- Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly
The artists succinct description of his working method "I rust things" is a pretty good indication of what to expect if you're a Haynes noob. How exactly he processes and decomposes sound remains a mystery, but whatever exactly it is that he does to his recordings, gives his work something of a trademark sound. And we're not talking a simple tape hiss VST plug-in here.
"Of Blast and Bleach" is something like an arcane radio signal being transmitted through time and space via a blackhole, landing on earth for a brief duet with broken jackhammer on an abandoned building site where nature is slowly reclaiming the land. The signal bounces off pylons and then gets absorbed into the cables. The hum, drone and crackle of "Nyet" oozes paranoia before "E. Kohver" drones like a possessed Eliane Radigue before her synthesizer malfunctions and combusts into flames.
Over on the flipside "Electric Speech: Nadiya" plays like some exhumed, damaged tape of Cold War radio transmissions / numbers stations. There are clear nods to Robert Ashley's "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon" from his classic 1979 album "Automatic Writing". This was apparently the only music Stephen Stapleton could listen to while tripping on acid without feeling claustrophobic and paranoid. Here, Haynes is equally inspired by Nurse With Wound's "A Missing Sense" which is kinda NWW's version of 'Automatic Writing' and expands on the collage of clipped female voices idea, with his execution giving things a paranormal/EVP type quality.
- Norman Records
For well over a decade now, the Californian noise/drone (de)composer Jim Haynes has pursued a single-minded research into the sound of decay. Shortwave radio transmissions and convulsive motors are a few of the sources that are modulated and amplified into his psychologically tense, hauntological recordings. His 2016 album "Flammable Materials From Foreign Lands" rises from the eruptive strategies found in John Duncan's extrapolations of empty radio signals with parallels to be found in the mutated electro-acoustic dynamics found in contemporaries like Kevin Drumm and G*Park. One of the foreign lands in question to this flammable album is Estonia where he rummaged through abandoned Soviet-era ruins and collected disquieting shortwave signals. The other land is California with its own darkened psyche they roils beneath the mythologies of eternal sunshine. It's not so much a dialect as an accretion of static, grit and phased electro-magnetic disturbances amplifying the neurosis and anxiety from a slow poisoning through psychological and/or environmental means. The first side of the album is pocked with convulsive crescendos which aggressively shove through Haynes' accumulated materials. The tracks rise to a boiling point, snap at the excessive pressure and collapse into a hypnotic fog. The second side is a single-sided collage of deconstructed/disembodied voice. Haynes clips and chops the mellifluous voice of an Estonian radio host (perhaps Tallinn's answer to Terri Gross?) into elemental gasps and utterances that rhythmically tick against an unsettled minimalism built from long, thin-wire recordings. Here, the strange and unsettled composition of voice and drone hauntingly resembles Alan Lamb's telegraph recordings poured into the empty spaces of Robert Ashley's "Automatic Writing."
- Stranded Records