CD - Helen Scarsdale
Under the moniker of Murmer hides Patrick McGinley, a field recordist who we remember for his We Share a Shadow, released in 2007 and the interesting live albums with Jim Haynes, another sound artist who works with Helen Scarsdale, a label specializing in the ambient and drone genres . McGinley is also well known for his radio broadcasts, which focus on site-specific explorations and on sound as a distinctive matrix of the places under consideration, in order to recreate a non-fleeting relationship between listeners and their surroundings. In this work the experimenter has been greatly fascinated by the dull emissions and vibrations of an air duct, sounds with an iterated murmuring quality offset by whistles and micro-emergences, glitches and disturbances. There are also passages with a more acousmatic quality, natural sounds, rough percussive elements, semi-melodic patterns and insertions of liquid digressions. In the various forms expressed in the recordings there are several audio features that are typical of an approach to composition that is not simply documentary or objective in nature. The captures become an opportunity to create a sensitive microcosmos wherein it is possible compare and create a dimension for every movement, every variation of volume and management of sound intensity: a dream journey in the artistic universe, maybe sometimes too abstract but defiantly not lacking elegance and a capacity for transmission.
Aurelio Cianciotta