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The first release on Boston label  Plates of Sound is a stunning vinyl edition of an acclaimed 2004 release by Australian sound artist Philip Samartzis. In the 1980’s Samartzis was a member of the industrial-turntable duo GUM, whose tone arm examinations and manipulation of unconventional surface noises could be credited towards informing the likes of Philip Jeck, Janek Schaeffer, and Otomo Yoshide. Samartzis has since gone on to collaborate with such luminaries in modern improv as Oren Ambarchi, Voice Crack, KK Null, and Keiji Haino and is a senior lecturer at RMIT in Melbourne. As the CD version on Samartzis’ Microphonics label is hard to come by, this release makes 500 copies available as a richly detailed long-player.
Record players were not used in the composition of Soft and Loud, an entrancing assemblage of site and event-specific field recordings made in Japan as far back as 1999 and completed in 2003. The composition was originally conceived for a circular array of eight speakers, with the ideal listening “sweet spot” not at a stationary dead center, but at changing points within the circle that a participatory listener chooses to investigate. Condensed to 2-channel stereo for release, Samartzis’ placement of sounds as aural representations of texture, distance and depth remains vivid, especially when approached with headphones or loud close listening.
His liner notes, beautifully printed on the insert in English and Japanese, describe the intertwining cultural and acoustic ideas at work as an “attempt to transcend the province of the sonic tourist merely focusing on the everyday, towards a form of hyperrealism based on enhancing perception of the minutiae of events that sonically inhabit and shape all spaces.”
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The album listens like an electro-acoustic classic, a series of meticulously arranged and paced sound events that seep or explode from the speakers. The field recordings have been processed, some are immediately recognizable while others are magnified fragments, sonic snapshots of a larger whole that are quickly exposed to the ears then quickly removed. Crackling raindrops, metal-on-metal train squeal, snatches of electronic and flute melodies, chatter of markets and pachinko parlors, the bristles of a sidewalk sweeping broom, flowing wind and water, the tone of a temple bell. The pristine and focused quality of these recordings is amazing. Some are recurring and overlapping, others appear only once but burn into the memory, simulating the way we process the deluge of new sounds when we venture outside our regular sound domains. All of this may seem heavily conceptual and theoretical, and it is, but the sound sources and Samartzis’ reconstruction of sensory experience ultimately keep you in the physical world. A work at once startling, mesmerizing and disorienting and absolutely recommended!
Andy Tefft - indieworkshop.com
Special limited edition 180g vinyl on Plates of Sound
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