CNV29
release date: 12.Mar.2006

MARK McLAREN - More Than Everything ep

Earlabs - 24.03.2006

I find the compositional method of taking sounds (be they organic or, as is the case here, recordings of other musical sounds) and deconstructing and/or processing them into something nearly unrecognizable and then combining them with other existing sounds to form new musical constructs exciting and fascinating. The new musical entity is unique in and of itself but with the slightly disconcerting quality that a ghost of the original sources are still there - disembodied sounds looking for their parents. This 16+ minute creation does a excellent job of showing the beautiful things than can happen when this creative compositional technique is done well. Continuously morphing sounds ranging from abstract and noisy to intelligible and ambient draw you into a new world of sounds with hints of their past floating in the background. Cheers to Mark McLaren for creating this and also to Conv for being insightful enough to release these kinds of experimentally innovative sounds.

[ Larry Johnson ]

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Vital Weekly 521

Perhaps the name Mark McLaren doesn't say much, but he's the cofounder of the MP3/CDR label Sijis Records and released, as Mutton Deluxe, on his own label (not reviewed in Vital Weekly). After talking and discussing ideas with various people, including Francisco Lopez, Yannick Dauby and Chris Watson, he explores in this new work the relationship between songs and found sound. The starting point was a list of 'top ten' records from last year by one Jerilyn Jordan. 'Various processes were used to remove and obscure instrumental and vocal traces. These residues were then combined with concrete music, hertzian textures and sounds which can only be remembered but never recorded' it reads some cryptically on the website. 'Environmental sounds recorded in Portugal and Estonia'. A bit clueless here what the top ten list has to do with it, or where it comes in, but the piece is certainly a nice mixture of many layered field recordings and obscured processes of, well perhaps, music. Over the course of the piece, things move field recordings very gradually into the world of pure electronic sound processing. It's a nice piece of soundscaping meeting microsound and luckily not one of 'barely there' music, but quite direct in y'r face. Nice stuff.

[ Frans de Waard ]

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