artist: SEIJIRO MURAYAMA & MICHAEL NORTHAM
title: Moriendo Renascor
label: Xing-Wu
country: Malaysia
format: CD
title: Moriendo Renascor
label: Xing-Wu
country: Malaysia
format: CD
"Our brains gather and process more information than we could ever actively
contemplate, but that information is often there when we need it, helping keep us out of
danger or sharpening out instincts. We have peripheral vision, so why not peripheral
hearing? Sound artist Michael Northam seems to wonder much the same thing, and much
of his career has been consumed with accumulating and ‘composting’ (his term,
essentially meaning the continual layering of sound sources, both on his self-built
instruments and environmental captures, over an extended period) such subliminal audio
experiences. He wants to do more than merely peek inside the anthill; he wants to
magnify and multiply its teeming activity into an immersive environment which lives its
own life.
So this four-track full-length, an expansion of a 2004 meeting between Northam and
improvising percussionist Seijiro Murayama, makes much of what we might otherwise
consider incidental. Northam provided the source material, most of it heavily layered field
recordings, to Murayama, who then improvised around these loose structures. Nothing
immediately recognizable, instrumentally or environmentally, emerges. Instead there’s
the gurgling flow of “I,” the enveloping swirl of spectral winds of “IV” or the pulsing
square wave drone that gradually decays over the course of “III.” There’s a palpable
sense of place, of movement through vast interior spaces, but not of location.
It’s Murayama’s contribution that is the key to understanding these pieces, as he finds a
way to improvise not with but within Northam’s dense constructs – without sounding at
all like an instrumentalist. He has, in a sense, tapped into that stream of peripheral,
subconscious sonic information so often hidden from us. Rustling, metallic clanking, the
woody shuffling of something being disturbed, low-volume friction, barely audible
rumbles: these – not rhythms – are his language here. It’s his astute, detailed textures (or
Northam’s arrangement of them – it’s impossible to say) that elevate Moriendo Renascor
above the mere field recording collage into a rarefied space where two voices merge
and create an entirely new, previously hidden enivronment."
(Matthew Wuethrich - Dusted)
contemplate, but that information is often there when we need it, helping keep us out of
danger or sharpening out instincts. We have peripheral vision, so why not peripheral
hearing? Sound artist Michael Northam seems to wonder much the same thing, and much
of his career has been consumed with accumulating and ‘composting’ (his term,
essentially meaning the continual layering of sound sources, both on his self-built
instruments and environmental captures, over an extended period) such subliminal audio
experiences. He wants to do more than merely peek inside the anthill; he wants to
magnify and multiply its teeming activity into an immersive environment which lives its
own life.
So this four-track full-length, an expansion of a 2004 meeting between Northam and
improvising percussionist Seijiro Murayama, makes much of what we might otherwise
consider incidental. Northam provided the source material, most of it heavily layered field
recordings, to Murayama, who then improvised around these loose structures. Nothing
immediately recognizable, instrumentally or environmentally, emerges. Instead there’s
the gurgling flow of “I,” the enveloping swirl of spectral winds of “IV” or the pulsing
square wave drone that gradually decays over the course of “III.” There’s a palpable
sense of place, of movement through vast interior spaces, but not of location.
It’s Murayama’s contribution that is the key to understanding these pieces, as he finds a
way to improvise not with but within Northam’s dense constructs – without sounding at
all like an instrumentalist. He has, in a sense, tapped into that stream of peripheral,
subconscious sonic information so often hidden from us. Rustling, metallic clanking, the
woody shuffling of something being disturbed, low-volume friction, barely audible
rumbles: these – not rhythms – are his language here. It’s his astute, detailed textures (or
Northam’s arrangement of them – it’s impossible to say) that elevate Moriendo Renascor
above the mere field recording collage into a rarefied space where two voices merge
and create an entirely new, previously hidden enivronment."
(Matthew Wuethrich - Dusted)