A Closer Listen
Difficult Art & Music has been having a wonderful three-year anniversary celebration. First there came the compilation I Only Like Difficult Art (and music), a double album (one CD, one LP) in which half of the tracks were taken from the back catalogue and half were unreleased. Now two of those unreleased albums are about to be unveiled in full.
Scolpaig‘s Spaceport One is less a science fiction album than a protest album. It publicizes plans to build a “Sub-orbital vertical launch Spaceport on the isolated island of North Uist within the Scottish Outer Hebrides.” This would not only displace the local residents but threaten the endangered species who live there. Over the course of three weeks, the artist recorded the ins and outs of daily life: time and tide, birds and bells, conversation and kelp. These sounds represent the initial layers of the soundscape: (gentle) human sounds laid atop those of the land and sea. To these he added his own percussive and synthetic contributions, creating a sort of ode that is also a midpoint between the current biophany and the proposed cacophony.
The album is both playful and sobering. One might even dance to “Spaceport Four,” watching as the waves roll in. But the threat of extinction is forever on the horizon: not only the loss of species, but of a way of life. Will those cows survive? Will those children need earplugs? The more chimes one hears, the more one thinks about the winds of change, blowing across the isle; is a spaceport really more important than a species and commerce more important than community? The final choral piece comes across as an elegy. The CD is available with a fifty-page artbook, packed with impressionistic photography.
Will Parker also has a shameful history to bring to light. Red Lake, Black Mine exposes the legacy of zinc, arsenic and copper mining in the Carnon Valley of Cornwall, which resulted in a strangely crimson lake. This release, which is both performance and physical artifact, is also available with a graphic score. The sounds, like the images, form a sort of collage: words and images jumbled and reassembled. Like Scolpaig, Parker visits the site, where he digs around and records pylons and other local resonances.
From the very beginning, the music sounds electric, like the feedback from radiation sensors. “Onsets Debris” is all crackle and crunch, like a lake no one would ever want to swim in. Bursts of sound, like feedback, are the sharks of this water. In “Repeat Between Mirrors,” a chime sounds like a warning drone. The most striking piece, first heard on I Only Like Difficult Art (and music) is “Study for Pylons, Electromagnetism and Abandoned Piano,” which seems more more accurate as a post-apocalyptic soundtrack than the music heard in Road Warrior. One imagines that when everything is polluted, even melody may disappear; humans, if they still exist, will hum along to hums. The literal digging of “Split Hands Touch the Soil” makes one worry about the artist’s health. Was he wearing protective gear? Surprisingly, the album ends in a song; the operatic “Until We Meet” features Francesca Stevens, but is far less romantic than its title implies. If “Spaceport Ten” is an elegy, “Until We Meet” is an irradiated danger sign.
These two albums, one imagining devastation that has yet to occur and the other reflecting a local ravening that has, form a perfect pair. This may not be difficult art, per se ~ each of these albums is eminently listenable – but they bear a difficult message. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. (Richard Allen)
Fri Apr 11 00:01:57 GMT 2025