December 2008 • Trente Oiseaux
Man, do I ever need something to clear my ears after all the grindcore I've saturated myself with recently... how about something light and airy; perhaps some field recordings? Simon Whetham's Understory is one of a huge collection of avant-garde material available from the excellent Trente Oiseaux netlabel; unfortunately it's not one of their better releases.
Essentially, Understory contains a wide variety of sounds recorded by a lake in Brazil, both naturally-produced and otherwise, such as birds and insects, storms, and bits of static, noise, musique concrète, etc. The recordings are assembled together, mostly unprocessed, for a sort of "raw" experience of the nature of the area. It's mostly presented in a very quiet, non-intrusive, ambient fashion, the kind of sound you can easily ignore if you want, with a few exceptions scattered here and there (like the sudden metallic noises near the end).
It's an interesting collection of sounds, to be sure, but I'm not really a huge fan. It feels very disjointed and aimless; one sample leads into another with little warning. It feels like watching a slideshow of someone's vacation photos—perhaps there are some that are nice, but stacking them all together doesn't make them any more interesting. I mostly find myself feeling bored listening to Understory. I don't see the appeal; I could go out to the suburbs and make a recording and it wouldn't sound much different.
Perhaps Understory is good as a jumping-off point for taking nature and making something out of it, but that isn't what happened here.
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