seattle's colin andrew sheffield has been quietly destroying sound since the late 1990's. beginning with 1998's side one/side two, on his own elevator bath imprint - also home to recordings from adam pacione and rick reed, among others - he's been utilizing man-made and "found" sounds in a continually sweeping effort to restructure what has come before him, with all genres and mediums up for grabs. his work has consanguinity with many dabblers in electro-acoustic and experimental music; an obsession with turning mechanical, digital, and everyday sounds into contemplative drones through concentrated layers of sustained recording, often with the occasional sprinkling of electrified emphatics to convey external impulse or to mark transition.
back in 2000, sheffield offered up his own music for surgery on the cassette-only, recycled music (rrrecords). while a collaborative effort, it marks an early instance of the conventions used in his music today: to literally disassemble into raw components a recording (tape, vinyl, microcassette, whathaveyou) and frankenstein it into music that can only be described as panoramic. it's a wildly unique approach that incorporates scientific methods to meet an aesthetic end.
it is appropriate that his newest release would come in partnership with invisible birds, a concept label committed to expression using abstract sound and image inspired by... birds (actual and implied). such a focused model can't be without well-considered artwork or presentation, and sheffield's disc sure looks nice. his signatures is the second release in the young catalog (the first a dvd from film artist matthew swiezynski), and some detail is required to get at the music.
a sampler, multi-track recorder, and vinyl were used to capture bird-related and -specific sound for reconstruction into long-play. you likely won't recognize a single source - short "clips" used are slowed to betray recognition and then layered in parallel and in series with some remarkable results. a sustained chord from a church organ is heard, but it's really not. bell-like harmonics from an analog synthesizer likely originate from a whippoorwill. our only acquaintance is the occasional, muffled pop from cartridge-on-vinyl. signatures is fours tracks of this, the first and last in dreamy excess of twenty minutes, and they are worth the sit just to hear the nuances come and go. "arise" uses trebly, airy samples and some killer use of reverb to evoke distance. and "surrender" is another relatively short piece, and provides the only instance where the disc's inspiration makes a faint, audible appearance, buried beneath thick textures.
while the disc is copyrighted for 2009, it is released this week, and after nearly a week of continued listening it has crept up as my dark horse for favorites this year. fittingly, i can find no better tribute to commemorate a tunesmith of the same fiber, who would be celebrating his 100th birthday - olivier messiaen.
the veil of mediated sound hangs heavy upon the work of colin andrew sheffield, a texan born sound artist currently living in seattle. his work is almost entirely based upon recontextualizing sounds from already released works, although unlike such plunderphonic artists like christian marclay, john oswald, and wobbly who allow for the samples to utter their origins, sheffield obliterates almost all of the references into a field of static vibrations, densely compacted layerings, and hyper-stretched drones. through his digital crucible, sheffield extracts something almost completely different out of the sources that he puts into it.
in running the ever impressive elevator bath label, sheffield has found an outlet for a handful of his recordings, mostly as small run editions with the one exception being his outstanding first thus cd. signatures was commissioned by the san francisco based label invisible birds, as the debut in what hopes to be a great catalogue of sound art composition that's somehow related to bird sounds and their environment. keeping true to his working methods, sheffield's contribution to invisible birds reclaims sounds from other records amidst what sheffield claims to be field recordings of water and birds. the results have been so heavily obfuscated through the process that it's hard to hear any twitter of birdsong. the thunderous low-end repetition on the last track is purported to be the flapping of a bird's wing, but it's hard to discern. all of this said, sheffield's results are gorgeous. at first, the album has almost an ominous feel, as a shimmering, arctic hush is shot forth from the speakers with layer upon layer of sympathetic vibrations interweaving into a hypnotic, if cybernetic sound. it sounds sort of like the classic chain reaction artists like porter ricks or hallucinator with all of the techno extracted, and only a cold, cold drone of digitality left behind. by the end of the album, sheffield brightens things into a stunning crescendo of church organ-like chords suspended in time and space with glints of vinyl crackle hanging like sunflecked dust floating in air. here, sheffield gives the impression of william basinski reclaiming a ligetti choral piece. very highly recommended.
this is the second release by a new label called invisible birds. their first release was m. swizynski's 'films 2007' we reviewed in vital weekly 625, although it didn't mention this as a label. the label focuses itself on releasing 'limited edition cds and dvds evocative of birds and the landscapes they inhabit', which i think is a very nice selection method for incoming demo's. colin andrew sheffield might better known from the releases on his own label, elevator bath, for which he released cdrs and a cd. his 'signatures' cd has its official release december 10th 2008, the 100th birthday of olivier messiaen, another lover of birds and music (probably in that order). sheffield uses a turntable, old sampler and a 'portable 64-track digital workstation' and no computer on these recordings. on the turntable lies records of nature sounds, birds and water, of which sheffield carefully selects fragments to sample and layer on his ancient workstation. if you staple enough sounds on top of eachother, then have them slightly out of sync, one can create beautiful drone music, and that's exactly what sheffield does here. the first three tracks are nice, but it will turn out they are exercises for what is to come: 'breath of day', the fourth and final epic of this, with gramophone hiss and organ like sounds, being stretched out over the course of the twenty-seven minutes this lasts. a true beauty, in all its simplicity. sometimes the simplest things is enough to get things done. the previous tracks, which lay out what sheffield wants, eventually, are great too, but aren't of the same beauty as the last one. if it would have been just the first three i would have been equally enthusiastic about this, now i'm probably ecstatic. great cd.
~ frans de waard
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the wire - outer limits - february 2009
just as matmos makes it easy to write about their high concept hi-jinks, there's plenty of preamble when it comes to this album from colin sheffield. this artist works reductively with appropriated material, and this is a label that is dedicated to works evoking avian life and their environment. signatures presents an opaque set of recordings through that conceptual lens in these four monochromatic tracks of suspended drone and din. the flattened layers of the first three tracks have the gravity of thick grey concrete, occasionally arcing into curved surfaces and bulging masses. while it's hard to categorise any of these sounds as birdlike, they are impressively physical renderings of a minimalist ethos. the album's finale "breath of day" is considerably lighter, with a sustained tone burst that resembles the church organs from touch's spire series. sheffield directs us toward heaven: and in casting our eyes upward, there's the chance we might spot a rare bird soaring in the sunlight.
as accretions of visibility and proximity paradoxically bring forth distance, some take to reconnoitering seamy corners and their singular thumb prints in a final push for renewal. 'signatures', from sound artist colin andrew sheffield, exists in such a vein, and it marks the inception of invisible birds as a music label.
according to this fracturing, dislocating vision, beauty is found in the seldom seen, or in what is even quickly vanishing. With this firmly in mind, birdsongs, wing flutters and movements, wrung through sheffield's turntable and 64-track digital workstation, become inexhaustible invitations to interpretation and fantasy.
vast quarries of well managed and mysterious layers open up on the first three tracks, held together by a curious incongruity. the impression is one of a naturally occurring body of spacious drones, buried under layers of warm grit, and glowing amber and grey in intermittent bursts of light.
after the detail and imagery of these pieces are pushed into the red, where they momentarily lose their tenuous grip on intelligibility, the album slips into its twenty-seven minute closing composition, "breath of day". a rattling, slightly damp sound, smeared with suggestions of eschatological fervor, particularly in the way in which the melody line staggers to keep pace with the sustained organ tones. the refined nature of the piece is an emphatic contrast and capstone to the artful tampering of the initial triad of works. from ashes to flames, the visible to the invisible, signatures parts with message-mongering in favor of far greater rewards.
issued on the centenary of olivier messiaen's birth (10 december), this is a fascinating series of sound studies. his name suggests a slightly geeky englishman, but sheffield is in fact american, & his work has been in circulation for some years, created using nothing more than "a turntable, a nearly 20-year-old sampler, and a portable 64-track digital workstation" - the resulting music betrays little of these simple means, though. there's an elliptical quality to many of the tracks, particularly the epic "breath of life", where organ textures wax & wane above an omnipresent drone. the special edition of 60 copies all enclosed within sumptuous packaging, plus a bonus 3" cdr is sold out (i'm delighted to possess a copy), but the standard edition is still available here..
speaking of colin sheffield, it's been a while from when diane and matthew at invisible birds sent this cd, which - needless to say - was lying in my archive crying for attention. and it deserved it, therefore shame on the late reviewer as usual, although it is impossible to follow a steady rhythm with all the good (and bad!) stuff that flows in the mailbox. signatures was composed on a portable 64-track digital recorder, a turntable and an old sampler. no computer in sight. the four tracks (five in the limited edition) were created by the exploitation of commercially available recordings, stretched, elongated, filtered and camouflaged until their features became completely unrecognizable. a beautiful record indeed, containing music which one could remotely associate to artists like janek schaefer, stephan mathieu and philip jeck but not so vinyl-tinged, even if we clearly distinguish typical pops and scratches here and there. what the work privileges is a practically constant superimposition of harmonic layers, rarely shaded with the recognizable qualities of a timbre (for example, the organ in the splendid "breath of day"), utterly rewarding without sounding neither overly nostalgic nor menacingly austere yet also floating in a foggy dimness often bathed in quasi-industrial trance. for sure the anguish that some of these pieces elicit didn't make me think of degradation or decay, instead transmitting sensations that reinforce the still unbroken link with an indescribable endlessness which, absurdly, causes a dejected feeling of near-conclusion. the perennial antagonism between mortality and the rest of the things that we'll never see or even know about.
through his unique, non-digital manipulation of old field recordings, colin andrew sheffield conjures forth an album of sounds we never pay attention to, the elemental ambient white noise beneath all the traffic, conversation, and things falling over of our daily lives.
the opening track sucks the listener into a vortex redolent of the atmospheric conditions inside a black hole. "arise" follows with a greater intensity, which increases as it "rises", a huge but slightly uncalibrated ventilation fan wobbling on its axis. "surrender" is like waking up in an airplane in the middle of the night, all the other passengers asleep, all light extinguished and that constant whoosh outside the fusilage the only sensory input being registered. as on any flight, the ear eventually acclimatizes it into a soft featureless music.
the half-hour long "breath of day" is a sacral commune, a huge pipe organ in a forest of redwoods - grandly meditative, gavin bryars in californian woods. its majestic and methodical pace is ocassionally sped up as the keys of the organ are more rapidly palpated, like the cardio-pulmonary system becoming excited by some insight emerging during contemplation before being assimilated and regaining its steady calm.
it's a remarkable achievement, fascinating in concept and execution and ultimtely, most importantly, in the lasting impression it makes.
