Joyce Hinterding | Spectral
Antiopic | CD
Harnessing the sounds of the earth's electromagnetosphere is by no means new - Joe Banks (as Disinformation) and Stephen P McGreevy both mapped this territory extensively throughout the 90s, and both arguably followed in the footsteps of Alvin Lucier. Nonetheless, the ghostly, disembodied earth-choruses charted on Joyce Hinterding's 'Spectral' have a haunting and mesmerising quality that repays repeated listening.
A single, expansive track, measuring just short of an hour, 'Spectral' navigates the outer reaches of space, capturing the earth's sonic details - the passing of satellites, the electromagnetic pulses of distant thunder storms - in pristine clarity. Whistlers and sferics pop and cascade, their distinctive tones rising and falling, indicators of the earth's electric restlessness.
Recorded in the isolated wilderness of Bruny Island, Tasmania with a series of custom-built antennae, 'Spectral' is a dense mixture of low end hum and high end crackle, woven together to create a dense fabric of sound. A complex recording, it's difficult to tell where the natural meets the artificial as Hinterding harnesses the earth's raw material sounds like an alchemist, wrenching sound from the surrounding sky, to create the sonic equivalent of gold.
[CM]
