Frans de Waard, Steve Roden, Howard Stelzer, Alejandra Salinas and Lutz Bauer | aenviron:one
Aesova | 3
Aesova spoil us with this little collection of strung-together field recordings. We know who the artists are but nothing more; no locations, times of day, artist's brief nor, indeed, knowledge of who did what. Thus the sounds stand alone, divorced from visual and other contextual clues.
The recordings are plain (closer to lo- than to hi-fidelity) but are, nonetheless, rich and complex and full of the unexpected. Each is given ample space. The transitions are gradual rather than jarring and serve to generate a gentle forward propulsion and a shifting point of focus.
I hesitate to catalogue every sound (such as I can identify it) but I do think it is worth singling out one recording toward the end in which the natural rhythms of some highly idiomatic speech and the sudden intervention of a ringing mobile phone puncture the hubbub of a busy street. A moment of real beauty - perhaps not that dissimilar to the many we filter out every day. File under Surround Sound.
[GM]
