Paul Liam Walker - Liapades

A Closer Listen

There’s a delicate art to the field recording based composition: How present should the recordings be? Should they stand alone as a sonic element or merge seamlessly with the other elements of the work? Should they barely register their presence?

On Liapades Paul Liam Walker plays with a variety of approaches to the form.  On opener “The Sea, The Sea,” the sound of waves gently lapping the seashore is the first thing you hear. But as the song progresses the sound of the waves fades to the distant background, as faint, in certain moments, as white noise, submerged beneath a gentle, minimalist piano and a sustained drone. The piano’s melody and an accompanying synthesizer eventually expand and ascend into Glassian repetition, swirling around the track’s aural space before ending with a lovely looped series of tones that gently disappear, returning to the solitary sound of water at the track’s end.

On a couple of the album’s tracks the field recordings are far less present. On “Cicadas,” for example, Walker launches immediately into subtly ascending, looped melodies and the soft swiping of a lo-fi drum kit. The cicadas sound is hiding way back in the mix, their song creating a subtle texture behind the warm, warped synthesizer loops. Once again, the various musical elements disappear just as the song is ending.

“Cicadas” is a surprisingly stunning example of natural sound converted quite seamlessly into a musical element. The cicadas song doesn’t seem particularly manipulated, its just there, gently contributing to the space and atmosphere of the track.

Natural sound re-emerges a little more forcefully in the opening of “Villa Elrini,” the chirping of birds beginning before the atmospheric melody, tinged with a slight hint of distortion, enters. The track’s  bell tones and a hovering, airy drone provide gentle accompaniment for the bird’s persistent chirping.

There’s a formulaic quality to these experiments, each track relying on a different recording and various instruments and timbres to carve out simple, looped melodies. On “Walk to the Beach” it’s footsteps and strings, on “Rovinia” it’s birds again as well as the gentle sounds of people talking accompanied by piano. Walker moves seamlessly between electronic, drone, and ambient melodies and textures, but the dominant tone of the album while gentle, also tends toward the melancholic or even somber. Walker describes the album as an auditory account of time spent in the Greek village of Liapades and the sound certainly channels the sort of wistful longing and inescapable sense of distance that accompanies the state of being a visitor to another place.

Album closer “Airborne,” as its title suggests, features the close, gentle whirr of an airplane cabin’s air. It’s the sparsest piece on the album, an eight minute meditation with plenty of space for the listener’s own thoughts. A series of choir-like sustained tones eventually emerge out of the white-noise saturated quiet, ascending to a higher pitch for a period before descending into lower registers as the track concludes.

Walker’s Bandcamp page notes that the album was created as part of the One Month Album project, the goal being to produce either 10 separate tracks or 35 minutes worth of original material during the month of July. While there is a nagging sense of formula here, there is plenty to admire in Walker’s play with the border between found, recorded sound and music across Liapades seven lovely tracks.  (Jennifer Smart)