A Closer Listen
The most amazing thing about Der Industriepalast is how much it sounds like the inner workings of the human body. The listener is fooled into thinking that they are hearing the amplified sounds of digestion, respiration, firing synapses and flowing blood, and this is rather the point. In 1747, Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’homme machine (Man, a Machine) proved so controversial that he had to leave his home country in disgrace; by 1926, Fritz Kahn’s poster Der Mensch als Industriepalast’ (Man as Industrial Palace) met a far more receptive audience. One might even posit that the Inside Out series takes its lead from his art.
While these sounds are not human, they are made by humans. They include field recordings from Everard’s Brewery in Leicester and the cellar of a pub owned by Louise Rossiter‘s parents. To these, Rossiter adds organic instrumentation, from violin and cello to percussion, then ferments the entire collection in an electronic brine. Could it be that growing up, Rossiter began to imagine the pub as a giant model of the human body? If so, it is reflected in this release.
This project has been years in the making; the first three tracks were released as an EP in 2023. “Homo Machina” combines the sounds of a hospital – beeps, hums and carts – with heartbeats and horns, imitating the busyness of an institution and ironically, the difficulty of sleeping in a hospital when construction is taking place outside one’s window. In the quiet hours, patients can hear the sound of their own digestion and breath; in the loud hours, the body is drowned out by the sound of other mechanisms. One of the returning sounds imitates morse code, as if signaling for help.
“Neuronen” starts with a ratchet, as if someone is working on the body with a cruel tool. Directly inspired by Kahn, this piece and the next play with concepts of time and maintenance, sampling a doorbell, a mechanical clock and a set of wind-up toy cars. The bell is a reminder of how the mind reacts to signals, be they microwave timers or ring tones; the clock tells us that we are all winding down. When the two are combined, they produce an alarm; too many signals lead to overload. As one might expect from the track title, “Synapse” imitates the firing of neurons, treating the body as a “power-station,” in this case the electro-acoustic sheen is a perfect conduit for the subject.
It’s no stretch to say that “Fairytale on the Bloodstream” is the brewery track, the only down side being that this makes us think of breweries and beer as much as “veins, arteries, gland caves and capillaries.” So why not combine the two? When drinking, alcohol enters the bloodstream, where it meets all manner of processes, including the filtering of the liver and – depending on how much one drinks – may have either a positive or an adverse effect on the heart. The smallest sounds do indeed sound like what we imagine as capillaries, while an unexplained ghostly tune in the fourth minute seems a reminder of mortality. More ominous sounds – horns, metal against metal, an advancing drone – cause the heartbeat to increase, imitating the stress of the modern world.
The remaining tracks zero in on the eye, the brain and the ear. “Iris Key” honors Kahn’s image of the eye as an entire body, answering Paul’s question, “If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing?” Liquid sounds intermingle with the mechanical, some akin to bicycle wheels and turn signals, reminiscent of a shifting gaze. For brief periods the composition blinks, taking micro-naps before opening wide again. The album’s briefest piece, “Kernel,” celebrates the brain as a nut, specifically a walnut, and shakes it up to hear what may be inside. “I/O,” dedicated to John Rossiter, narrates the journey of piano notes to the ear and their subsequent translation. In the hearing of this piece, the listener becomes part of the experiment: hearing within hearing, an ear within an ear. The walnut mind creates a narrative, assigns value to the sounds, and stores it all away for future reference, machinelike, and yet still undeniably human. (Richard Allen)
Mon May 19 00:01:02 GMT 2025