U02 | Luigi Turra & Christopher McFall | tactile.surface
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format : CD ltd to 250 copies
release year : 2009
length : 42’00
status : still available !
[ante-scriptum/preface by Jim Haynes]
Christopher McFall resides in Kansas City. On this recording, he braces the work with a story of his travels through the western part of Kansas through the snow on a trip into Colorado. I know nothing specifically about McFall‘s journey other than what he brings to the table, but it immediately snaps to the foreground my own journey through the heartland of America many years ago. He mentions the confrontation with an absolute sky; and that’s certainly a prominent part of the landscape. Maybe, even the most defining part of the landscape; as there’s very little else to focus one’s attention. During my travels, I ended up stopping at a town for some gas. Okay, it was in Nebraska; and it’s hard to even call that locale a town. But anyway… Above me, the sky was empty and weighty at the same time, and no one seemed to be around even at 5:00 pm on nice, sunny day. The gas station had a couple of busted pumps, and the receiver on the pay phone was dangling off its hook (this was a time long ago, before the era of the cellphone). Dust coated the ill-kept streets; and seriously, there was a three-legged dog wandering aimlessly down one of those empty roads. After pumping the gas, a civil defense siren blared through the town. This was to be the sound that preceding the dropping of The Bomb; and I immediately thought, who the fuck would want to bomb this place. The siren’s reason was probably far more benign, merely a test for when a tornado might barrel down from the Rocky Mountains peaking off to the west in the horizon. Nevertheless, I didn’t much care to have an episode of my life so handily written by David Lynch; and thus, the episode stuck with me.
So when I listen to McFall‘s collaboration with Luigi Turra, I hear the sound of that sky. The same desolation that McFall speaks of resonates from my own experience. McFall‘s journey was winter one, and thus the wind becomes colder, more abrasive, and even those Lynchian allusions seem to harken from within. But this is not all that the two bring to the table. Textures abound within their composition, both expressed through digital treatments and in rough-hewn audio verité. These textures ooze out the aforementioned wind / sky recordings of omnipresence rumbles, through aggregated collages that point to shards of metal, ceramic, moss, and soil all getting crunched between four pair of grimy hands. The density and physicality of the McFall / Turra textures move this out of what undoubtedly must have been an exchange of digital files; and their album is all the better for it. I would like to believe that these two were rummaging around in the middle of Kansas in some agricultural cistern while the wind scrapes their microphones out of place, like a collaboration between Eamon Sprod and Marc Zeier that I would like to hear. I know the truth is probably far more mundane, but I still would like to believe it.
A word to the artists: Gentlemen, this is a fine album, and one you should be proud of. But surely, a better title could have been in order.
: info :
“tactile.surface” is the sound presentation of a virtual place, an imaginary environment born from the alchemy of recordings between two different but real places, far apart geographically, yet close in time and spirit.
On one side, are the sounds captured in the intimacy of my living room in the small city of Schio (North of Italy),
mainly those reflecting its silence, and also some caught from the windows in the early hours of morning,
enhanced with some discreet short recordings of shakuhachi flutes ;
On the other side, lies the open space of Kansas City urban context, and the sound/views absorbed during a long travel to Colorado by Christopher McFall.
The two different sound places have been blended into a new one, rich of memory and keeping intact the physical perception of the surfaces, and their tactile, material aspects. (Luigi Turra)
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Almost 2 years ago, I travelled home to see my mother in Colorado. This was no simple journey as I had to drive for 12 hours from Kansas City into the western lands of Kansas & Colorado. Tactile.surface really takes me back to that particular journey, because I was listening to the tracks we were compiling for it as I drove the length of the journey.
Desolate : is the only word I can think of describing Western Kansas and its snow covered expanses.
there is to be found there the most abrasive wind patterns, a generalized sense of absence, and an undeniable confrontation with absolute sky (there’s only one topography here, and it’s completely flattened as the sky becomes your envelope).
battered snowlines will outfit our drudgery
we sweetened the deal to touch in cold January
where roads give way the elemental trajectory
sunlit eyes were seeding the alchemy
This work traverses many surfaces and covers so much terrain. Many of the parts were extracted from manipulated recordings that originated from treated audio tape. Many of the “broken” low-ended sounds that served as base primer for the piece came from that side of things. The more “crisp” overlay sounds are derived from Luigi‘s workings.
The experience of it all was much the equivalent of weaving a tapestry of surfaces which resulted in a composite abstract topography (Christopher McFall)
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