U61 | grisha shakhnes | being there
1. Occurences at the End of a Curve_excerpt
2. It’s a Good Day to Stay Outside_excerpt
format : CD ltd to 200 hand numbered copies/Digital
Regular edition of 170 copies packaged in clear vinyl sleeve with folded insert + an additional art card both on 350gr satin paper
Special ultra ltd edition of 30 copies packaged in 300gr thick pure white cardboard digisleeve with frame. it holds a set of 2 double-sided art cards with a different artwork from the regular edition on 350gr satin paper.
+ additional hand-numbered inkjet print on 100% recycled cotton rag paper of a scanned/treated image of a reel to reel tape (none the same).
Digisleeve holds minimalist ruffled circle motifs (none the same), and stamp
and comes in a resealable cello.
release year : 2019
length : 59’59
tracks : 1. Occurrences at the End of a Curve
2. It’s a Good Day to Stay Outside
status : still available
>>> order via Paypal : chalkdc@unfathomless.net
Regular edition
(Belgium) : 14 € (inc.postage)
(Europe) : 15 € (inc.postage)
(World) : 16 € (inc.postage)
Special ultra ltd edition SOLD OUT !
(Belgium) : 17 € (inc.postage)
(Europe) : 18 € (inc.postage)
(World) : 19 € (inc.postage)
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: info :
This album is a field recording. It’s a field recording of me recording music. It’s a recording of my room and the street outside. One track was recorded in the morning during a holiday, the other on a weekday afternoon. In a way, all of my albums since “Ghosts” are field recordings. Most of them weren’t planned to be, but I don’t really have a choice. I’ve been recording onto a Zoom digital recorder since I moved here. Sometimes I try to eliminate the outside noise, but my apartment has no double-paned windows and I can’t be completely silent either. So is this album really any different?
Well, for one, the set up here is different. I have altered my set up several times over the course of the 10 or so years I’ve been playing music. The last change was one of the most significant. I disconnected my mixer’s aux outputs from the reel to reel. Instead, the tape’s input is now two microphones – a contact mic and a Shure SM57.
When I record, I can only think of the intended result in terms of things like structure, volume or duration. I don’t approach recording with a preconceived concept, and I try to keep my mind clear. But connections to the real world become evident when the music is played. I try to approach listening in the same way as any listener, but the difference is that I know the process, the environment and the source of the sounds on the recording. On some recordings, although you can hear the surroundings sometimes, they safely can be ignored. On others, the surroundings are equally as important as the music I made. And in some cases the surroundings can be ignored, but my presence is a part of the work. Adding the microphones to the set up allows for an exploration of the room’s surface and space, making the music tightly connected to the room it has been made in.
I could go on and make this text a bit longer and fill some gaps, but I’m not sure it’s necessary. As much as the subject may seem mundane, I’ll just say that what has been increasingly important in my work, starting with “Something to Ponder Upon”, is this gap between what you know and what I know, between what I choose to tell you and what I choose not to, between the sounds you think you hear and you actually hear. The most significant difference between this release and the previous ones is probably my choice to eliminate some of this gap. My choice to let you know all these things; that this is a record about an artist, a musician, and his living room. It’s about his presence in this room. It’s about his environment, and his relationship with his environment. It’s about listener’s relationship to the artist’s environment and also his own environment. And it’s about listening and the choices we make – as artists and as listeners.
(grisha shakhnes, December 2018)
: reviews :
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Recorded in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel the new recording from Grisha Shakhnes is uniquely set apart from other field recordings in that it is that of both indoor and outdoor sounds, contained and free. These sounds penetrate through personal space and were sometimes incidental. Shakhnes explains his making of Being There as follows:
“When I record, I can only think of the intended result in terms of things like structure, volume or duration. I don’t approach recording with a preconceived concept, and I try to keep my mind clear. But connections to the real world become evident when the music is played.”
Of course his sense of both observation, and allowing the outside to seep in without explicit permission speaks volumes about his sense of trust, but then again it is only one hour in the scope of all time – so conducting the edit is crucial. Occurrences At The End Of A Curve, for these intents is incredibly perceptive even when out of ‘control’. There are repeating patterns, like low-formed oscillations that are barely perceptible at times, entering the fray. Much here sounds of erased tape loops, dusty drones that have bare surfaces and move from slight forms to hollowed out spaces.
I feel as though my sensitivity is being challenged by the muffled atmosphere, there is quite a bit of suppression, although every once in a while a few birds fly into the frame of reference, as does a car horn. I’m left sort of eavesdropping into one’s personal space, evidently a rather new home for the artist himself. And while our personal spaces are being breached by Silicon Valley and surveillance on a regular basis we are sort of only slightly maladjusted to a post-1984 world these days – as we have given “permission” via fine print legalese to those who wish to market to and watch us daily.
For my ears this leads to the potential of discussion of ye age-olde subliminal messaging – but Shakhnes inverts this by offering up this play on internal/external worlds breaking bread serendipitously through sheer proximity. On It’s A Good Day To Stay Outside (which runs nearly 44 mins) the title gives a sense of hope to those who still accept the fact that there is a vivid world with its many facets awaiting our presence everyday. One where artists make marks to communicate with the outside world, however introverted, etc. The gravelly tactile spirits rise, and other crow-like sounds offer something quite post-apocalyptic, however – like this ghost town is dotted with the detritus of those who once walked on this particular soil. Or is this a mere illusion…an active geiger counter? Towards the end overlapping radio transmissions invade all channels, and cancel each other out. Save to say, there is a lot of mystery built into the minimalism of Being There. And I like it here..
TJ Norris
Toneshift
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A dense collage of sound “recorded live at home” and, I take it, processed [not so, I’ve learned–it’s live: description here]. In any case, one gets layers of sound that fall somewhere between natural and mechanical–hard to determine which, often enough–with hollow moans and disembodied, unintelligible voices, masterfully mixed, dramatically (slowly) paced—claustrophobic, powerful and fascinating..
Brian Olewnick
Just Outside
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Being there: a solid and intriguing expression of art in the process of creation
Israeli artist Grisha Shakhnes is blunt about this release: it’s a field recording and moreover a field recording of himself recording music at home in his room amid a background of sounds and noises from the street outside his home in Tel Aviv. “Being there” captures something of Shakhnes’ working environment, the methods he uses to make field recordings and the raw material in those recordings. As Shakhnes admits, “Being there” brings the listener into that environment and immerses the listener in there, almost seeing, hearing, feeling and experiencing the life that Shakhnes experiences daily. The recording reduces some of the distance that exists between musicians and their listeners on music that listeners experience second-hand, rather than in a live environment. Above all, “Being there” is a brave endeavour on Shakhnes’ part to reach out to listeners and invite them into his world, to deepen the connection that Shakhnes first made by recording music and which listeners complete by choosing to listen to his music over other musicians’ work.
The recording itself sounds much more structured and coherent than you’d expect it to. The first track in particular, quiet though it is, and consisting of an ongoing scratchy whirring drone that occasionally develops wobbles, is possessed of single-minded intensity. Things may go bump during the course of the track but it continues to drive down its intended path. It does seem to reach its destination in the end. The second track is a much longer piece lasting some 43 minutes and is a much more complex entity. It scrabbles quite a lot, there seem to be interruptions, and background noises and voices intrude, but the track stubbornly maintains its focus and direction. Where it’s going, we don’t know but there’s something compelling about the attention to detail and minutiae in the track that takes us along for the ride. I would say this is the genius of a recording such as this, that the attempt to reach out to listeners and to reduce some of the distance between the artist and the audience is achieved by drawing the audience into the artist’s world and setting them at the same level as the artist, following as fellow equals the artist in the work of creation. The risk involved – that the audience might see the artist with all the same faults and frailties they have, rather than as some semi-divine messenger they had also believed, fail to appreciate what the artist is trying to do, and fail to respect the artist as a fellow human – may be great.
Overall this is a very solid and highly immersive recording. You just have to be there..
Nausika/Jennifer Hor
The Sound Projector
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Though much of the music that’s covered by this site tends to defy description, works as choice and subtle as Grisha Shakhnes’ being there are especially difficult to write about. Not the music itself per se, but its impact, the qualities that make it such an emotional experience. That being said, this doesn’t seem to hinder Shakhnes himself from providing a wonderfully succinct summary of his approach to the album: “I’ll just say that what has been increasingly important in my work… is this gap between what you know and what I know, between what I choose to tell you and what I choose not to, between the sounds you think you hear and you actually hear. The most significant difference between this release and the previous ones is probably my choice to eliminate some of this gap. My choice to let you know all these things; that this is a record about an artist, a musician, and his living room. It’s about his presence in this room. It’s about his environment, and his relationship with his environment. It’s about [the] listener’s relationship to the artist’s environment and also his own environment. And it’s about listening and the choices we make—as artists and as listeners.” Such simple yet evocatively relationary language hits at the core of being there, a work that’s ultimately about representing and creating connections; conveyed to the listener are the comfort of recognizable environmental sounds, the wordless conversation Shakhnes is engaged in with those sounds (one of my favorite examples of this is his call and response to flutters of birdsong midway through “Occurrences at the End of a Curve”), and the moments of otherworldly beauty when the borders between artist and environment fall away completely. Though entirely unique, it’s another fantastic entry in the genre that Thomas DeAngelo so aptly dubbed “focused ennui.”.
Jack Davidson
Noise Not Music
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“Sometimes I try to eliminate the outside noise, but my apartment has no double-paned windows and I can’t be completely silent either”. Perhaps this sentence, taken from Grisha Shakhnes’ liner notes to this album, is filtered by this writer’s ever-growing unsociability; however, it does seem to express both a quest for quietness frustrated by the inevitability of human activity in a populated area, and the intention of using a potential problem as a compositional strategy to ultimately arrive at a different kind of silence. The expression “being there” suggests a relinquishment of the original need; a symbol of the acceptance of simply existing amidst other beings and learning to merge our own currents in the huge flow to avoid exasperation, as per the longest track’s title “It’s A Good Day To Stay Outside”.
Sticking to the content, Shakhnes has revealed time and again a distinct ability in utilizing field recordings and their transformations to encourage a listener’s appreciation of the wholeness rather than the attempt to locate details and sources. Although there is a percentage of definite character in the acoustic landscape, the overall feeling is that of a diary page mildly discolored by sonic matters deprived of frequencies in selected ranges, as to maintain a murkiness which is necessary to hit the creative target. In another passage of his explanation, Shakhnes hints to “the sounds you think you hear and you actually hear”, once more highlighting how one’s psychological setting is decisive in the variability of perception and in the correctness (or lack thereof) of the meanings attributed to the message. At the end of the day, this junction of amplified and/or camouflaged room activities and wobbly anthropoid interference is functional enough to keep our focus throughout the full hour..
Massimo Ricci
Touching Extremes
Unfathomless 