A Closer Listen
There’s a lot to unpack in Traces ~ literally and figuratively. The initial rush of wonder occurred when opening the package at work. My colleagues gathered around, all curious about what this thing was: a 10″ record, a large 52-page zine of collage art, an even larger poster and other ephemera ~ a rare collection in the digital age. Even before playing a note, they were fascinated and I was excited.
The music induces a fake memory: nostalgia for the late nights of the black and white era, when one could flip through the TV channels late at night and find all manner of haunted tale and tortured narration. We recognize this as misremembrance, because there weren’t many TV stations back then, and those that existed went off the air early. Imagine a radio dial caught in a radioactive storm, broadcasting snippets from long-dead musicians, traveling through space and time, conflating past and present. Filax Staël (Bas Mantel) has been collecting these snippets for years, folding them into mini-compositions. When Simon Taylor writes, “How do we read sound?”, we respond with images of our own. A review is a form of translation. So too are the printed art and videos that accompany these 24 short tracks: abstract impressions that leave the mind free to wander, to draw their own associations. DJ Spooky is quoted in the magazine: “The world is a very, very, very big record. We just have to learn how to play it.”
How to play Traces? One may choose to view all of the video clips, or let the needle drop in the darkness, or stream the music in the daylight while attempting to match sound and page. One may make connections between the often descriptive track titles ~ “The Day the Tide Truly Turned,” “Hunted Beyond the Glory of Light” ~ or create one’s own titles and short stories. These are, after all, only traces: traces of unearthed instructional videos, symphonies and field recordings. “Watch – something’s coming in now from the upper left!” warns the narrator of “Blue Dances.” But what is it? Is it a monster, a memory, a connection between sight and sound? The timbre of “Hunted” suggests The Twilight Zone, an old dictaphone recording closing the piece, leading to backward masking on the next.
In this week’s news, Voyager may no longer be broadcasting. Should extraterrestrial beings ever intercept the Golden Record, might it not sound to them like Traces sounds to us? Will the aliens struggle with the pictograms in the same way as we wrestle with the collages? Or will they see the art as possessing its own internal beauty, disassociated from any given interpretation? One may clutch the word “reality,” repeated in “Song for Okko (Rune Song)” before it slips away, or accept that there are other realities we cannot glean.
“What happens when we strip away our assumptions?” asks Taylor. We are left with impressions. In “Between Gravity and Grace,” young lovers are speeding toward a tractor beam. The beeps of “Return -A-” may come from a checkout counter or heart monitor. The zine’s centerfold connotes SETI and electrical currents, while the next spread lists discarded formats (floppy discs, punched tape), which were at one time themselves considered futuristic. The sole splash of Technicolor on the page marked “The Distant Made Near” is a reminder that time is always in motion; in contrast, the rapidity of tumbling images in the “Gradient I” video fools the eye like an 8mm film reel.
The last track title is open to interpretation. One may feel or be “Lost,” or lose one’s self in a pleasant pursuit. Initially, Traces suggests the former, but ultimately it suggests the latter. The narrator describes it as “the end of the line,” but one need not disembark; the train will soon reload, and head back in the direction from which it came. (Richard Allen)
Thu Mar 14 00:01:08 GMT 2024