A Closer Listen
As an avid collector of sea glass, I walk the shore in search of sharp edges made smooth. But until this month, I had never heard of a parallel pursuit: the search for sea brick. As he was recovering from an abusive relationship, Brandon Auger spent countless hours scouring the rocky shoreline of Point Pleasant Park, eventually accumulating 104 pieces of broken brick, seeing them as metaphors of what had been broken and what might be rebuilt.
In a similar fashion, the artist regarded the eroding military batteries and their protruding metal spikes as “a physical manifestation of struggle and resilience.” These tactile experiences of touch and sight are now translated into sound.
terminal runner begins with the sounds of dragging and scraping, bringing to mind a famous line by Peter Gabriel: “I’m digging in the dirt to find the places I got hurt.” The cover provides another metaphor, portraying a rocky slab that some might overlook and others might call beautiful. One can hear Auger working: working with the materials at hand, working through the trauma he has experienced. He begins to hammer, as if to reconstruct. The recording is at first arid and dry, but in the sixth minute the sounds of the shore begin to enter, a healing grace. At the same time, the hammering becomes musical, sensical, orderly, before fading into walls of windswept drone.
While “martello” follows a trajectory, it also circles back around, from found percussion to pure shoreline sound. According to Auger, the cyclical nature of these recordings is meant to imitate the cycle of abuse, although here it is also a cycle of recovery: one moves forward, one moves back, but eventually something is gained. A disturbing, hi-pitched sound, almost sentient, is detected in the fourteenth minute, but swiftly disappears like an old, injurious memory. Only in the final minute does the artist reappear.
“slate return” may refer to the sea brick, the return of what has been shattered after it has been washed, tumbled, abraded. This idea forms the crux of the composition. To process a memory, especially a trauma, is to make the rough edges smooth. In like fashion, what one person might consider garbage – or perhaps more properly, debris – another might salvage, cherish, embrace. The piece tosses and churns like the internal mechanisms of the sea. In the center, sounds like foghorns and buoys appear, a framework of safety. Brick by brick, the artist is building his new emotional home. (Richard Allen)
Mon Sep 15 00:01:12 GMT 2025