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Last 5 copies! — “Relisten indeed you will.” (The Wire) The work of Austrian sound artist Bernhard Gal is concerned with the discovery (as opposed to the imposition) of musical structures within the nuances of everyday life. The stammering in the spaces of spoken language, the ubiquitous noise of urban environments, the steady stream of of buzzes and whirrs that are a byproduct of mass transportation, all become subjects examined under Gal's extraorinarily precise microscope. He explores ideas about time and language, extrapolating and enlarging and repeating the often overlooked details and minutae until their inherent sonic beauty supercedes their typical mundane habitat. Following last year's critically acclaimed "Defragmentation/Blue" CD (Plate Lunch, GER), "Relisten" is Gal's first domestic US album. Each of the six tracks is its own self-contained piece, spurred by some personal association to the composer. However, taken all together, one can travel by sound from New York City (where Gal spent a year's residency at the Leo Baeck Institute) to the subways of Vienna and beyond. The piece "lv, nv" uses adaptive filters to uncover hidden musical elements always present at a Vegas casino. Another, "Tong-hua yie-shi" could be described as real-time musique concrete, created by walking through a Taiwanese night market equipped with a stereo microphone, DAT, and headphones. "Relisten operates between the world's soundscapes and their detachment from context", says Gal. "The personal discovery of music within nature as well as within the routines of everyday life keeps fascinating me. Sometimes I return to a certain place only to record its sound." "Gal crafts his sound material with deadly precision, using repetition to great
effect: "lv, nv" uses sounds recorded in a Las Vegas casino, but the clanging din
of the gaming rooms is all but entirely filtered out, leaving only an eerie
harmonic shell sporadically peppered with tiny avalanches of slot machine jackpots.
It's as achingly beautiful as the high Nevada desert that surrounds the mad phantom
city. "Relisten" indeed you will." -Dan Warburton, The Wire. "This release focuses on revealing the inner beauty of selected field recordings... Shows Gal’s commanding talent for sound art. Recommended." -All-Music Guide "A fascinating meditation on public spaces." -Jeremy Keens, Ampersand Etc. "A more dynamic, imaginative brand of musique concrete. At points, Gal’s pieces are simply creations from the field, snapshots of sound as memory. Frequently, however, the composer manipulates and layers these recordings to create something quite apart from the initial experience." -Paul Lemos, Under the Volcano "This is my first introduction to the work of Gal, and it is a pleasure. It undermines the obvious and brings to light more or less hidden structures and music in everyday life. As a whole this is a very varied CD with a lot of angles, but all of them taken well care of. Recommended." -Vital Weekly
electrocd.com Gal: Relisten: description |
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