Aphasia Recordings, APHASIA 22

The Sound we are now is a CD from a small, artist-run record label in Dublin, Aphasia Recordings. It springs from an interesting idea: label founders David Stalling and Anthony Kelly asked various artists to send in a piece that captured what they were doing at that very moment in time, whether a fragment, a work-in-progress or something just completed.

As you can imagine the resulting CD is a mixed-bag. It is fascinating to hear a piece in development, but any act of creation is a process towards some point of completion, where the artist is satisfied that a work is as good as it can be. Any Heisenbergian observation collapses the future improvements into the current reality. And it takes courage for an artist to allow such an observation. However, most pieces seem to be finished works, or fragments of larger wholes rather than snapshots of the creative process.

The main emphasis falls upon found sounds, and their assemblage into ‘contemporary creative sound work’. Some pieces suffer from being detached from the installation that accompanied them, their context being lost, for example Jon Aveyard’s Resonator Improv or David Beattie’s Shadow 1.

The successful, however, are very successful – thoughtful and thought-provoking. Fergus Kelly’s Fanfare for an Uncommon Man uses the whizzes, bangs and crashes of fireworks to create a percussive piece that charms and surprises. Danny McCarthy recorded the furniture, objects, surfaces and spirit of a house that had been in his family for generations just before it was sold, with ghostly results. Mysterious vibrations, indeed.

Mick O’Shea recorded the Raum de Stille, the Berlin Room of Silence that was opened beside the Brandenberg Gate in 1994, inspired by the meditation room in the UN building in New York. Its muffled sounds inspire the contemplation of peace at the junction of East and West Berlin. Artificial Memory Trace’s SOUND_am-I creates a collage of sounds that tickle and pleasure the ear: parrots, flying foxes, insects, birds, fragments of instruments, fragments of conversations, and the cries of a newborn baby.

Listening to the whole CD through from track 1 to 23 can be unrewarding with each individual piece becoming diluted by proximity and sequence. But individually there are real pleasures to be enjoyed: Kelly and Stalling’s Powerhouse 3, Max Eastly’s The moon on the lake shines between the winds between the pine trees and a long night grows quiet at midnight and Dennis McNulty’s MDE.

Listening to individual tracks, the spaces created can transport the listener to different environments. The real-world sounds that these artists gather and horde from their lived experiences are built creatively into architecture for the ear.