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by Susanna Bolle in Grooves 19
Melbourne, Australia-based musician Philip Samartzis uses the sounds of the everyday to make his meticulously crafted music, but they are not necessarily the sounds of his own everyday life. Beginning in the mid-‘90s, Samartzis has periodically acted as a kind of sonic voyeur, collecting field recordings from various parts of the world, including France, the Netherlands, Japan, and Denmark, which then form the building blocks of his work.
“In 1996, I embarked upon a series of projects in which I traveled to countries where English was not the dominant language in order to enjoy a purely abstract sonic experience devoid of any verbal meaning,” he writes via e-mail, explaining the genesis of his sojourns. “After spending a specific amount of time purely listening to the environment in which I found myself, I would begin a series of field recordings to capture acoustic events that held some form of personal meaning in the way I interpreted or experienced a specific place or event. I wasn’t so much interested in presenting a soundscape of a place, but rather a composition underscoring my personal impressions of places in which I did not belong.”
His most recent solo release, 2004’s Soft and Loud (Plates of Sound), is the product of the most ambitious of his phonographic expeditions to date. Originally conceived as an eight-channel installation, the piece was assembled from a store of field recordings made in Japan over a two-year period, evolving through a number of iterations—with different versions of the piece appearing on recordings such as Samartzis’ 2003 contribution to the Mort Aux Vaches series (Staalplaat) and the 2002 compilation Grain (Dorobo)—until Samartzis finally arrived at a version that he says accurately reflected “the atmosphere and tension I felt while living in Japan.” Drawing on the techniques of musique concrète, Samartzis evokes this tension by layering, contrasting, and stitching together disparate sources ranging from the soft, meditative quiet of a Shinto temple and the delicate sonic textures of rural Japan to the loud, clamorous chatter of pachinko parlors and the chaotic bustle of the Tokyo subway. He treats sounds not so much as documentary artifacts, but as elements within an overarching compositional structure of contrasting passages of soft and loud that form subtle, smaller narratives within a larger aural journey through his Japan.
“Once I had completed gathering field recordings, I began to compose using multilayering and juxtaposition to construct various movements to highlight the discrete sounds that permeate throughout the Japanese soundscape and how they combine to mark a place with its own personality,” Samartzis says. “This approach is inspired by film sound design, where the score is painstakingly constructed from multiple events to forge a sophisticated audio-visual discourse.”
Samartzis began working with sound and signal processing in the mid-‘80s, inspired by the DIY aesthetic of punk, no wave, and experimental music, as well as the introduction of cheap synthesizers and recording equipment. Samartzis began in full earnest with the formation of Gum with Andrew Curtis, after answering Curtis’ ad in a local record shop. “We spent a lot of time listening to and discussing the nature of experimental music in order to determine the type of contribution that we were prepared to make,” Samartzis recalls of their early experiments. “With the guitar and synthesizer dominating the musical landscape we decided to pursue other forms of sound generation and decided upon the record player and prepared record as the best means of articulation.
“After a year of experimentation, in which we discovered various ways of manipulating vinyl through marking, baking, melting, and smashing an assortment of records, we embarked on our first studio recordings during the middle of 1987 that were eventually published by ourselves in true DIY style under the title Vinyl.” The duo released a second album of innovative vinyl manipulation and grainy audio collage, 20 Years in Blue Movies and Yet to Fake an Orgasm, and a pair of EPs. all of which have recently been released on a definitive double-CD set titled Vinyl Anthology on 23five. When Gum disbanded in 1990, Samartzis stopped working with vinyl altogether and shifted his attention away from the analog production techniques that he had honed during his partnership with Curtis. He re-focused his energies on experimenting with digital signal processing and recording with his customary rigor, pursuing a PhD in sound at the RMIT University in Melbourne, where he is now a professor.
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