Pedro Vian, Merzbow - Inside Richard Serra Sculptures

A Closer Listen

Inside Richard Serra Sculptures, a new album by Pedro Vian and Merzbow, begins with the sound of distant, sonorous droning buried deep underneath layers of crunchy, dirty, dense swirls of feedback. It sounds as though wind is ripping apart the microphones that are capturing its movement. It’s a subterranean, eerily Lynchian soundscape and not exactly what I myself might have imagined as the soundtrack for, as the album’s literal title suggests, Richard Serra’s sculptures. Serra, who passed away earlier this year, was known for massive steel sculptures often installed in public places where their stature competes with the surrounding architecture. Just as often however, Serra’s work consumes the interior space of museums and galleries, looming over visitors and overpowering the other artwork within its shadow. It was within one of these interior spaces, DIA Beacon to be precise, that Vian decided to make a series of field recordings inside Serra’s work.

Inside Richard Serra Sculptures, an album comprised of two parts, was released earlier this year and is the first collaboration between Vian and Merzbow, two artists whose approach to sound could not be further apart. Vian’s work is traditionally ambient and melodic, while Merzbow’s sonic language, which doesn’t really need an introduction is harsh and, well, noisy. The disagreement their collaboration produces can’t help but be the point.

Vian’s ambient droning and field recordings seem to occupy little space on the first half of the album. The density of Merzbow’s noise lightens only briefly, around the halfway point of the first composition, allowing the subterranean vibrations which have been buried underneath to undulate disorientingly around the stereo space. As the barrage of noise begins again, sonic elements are more varied. Fast scraping squiggles and rich squalls, are introduced and cut off. More gentle percussive sounds and murmurs are given some breathing room. Listeners can hear the resonant sonic envelope of Vian’s captured sounds and the relationship between those sounds and Merzbow’s harsh frequencies is allowed to play out.

It’s in the second piece on the album that more of that relationship is foregrounded. It’s a much quieter piece, structured in the beginning by a simple three note melody that ascends over and over gently but persistently, underneath thrusts and pops of harsh static frequencies. Over the course of the work the noise becomes more complex and rapid and Vian’s melodies and their textures evolve. Although the melodies seem to be grounding Merzbow’s noise, it’s hard to argue that they succeed. The persistence of ambient sounds underneath noise does however evoke the image of a small but mighty force that can’t be stopped despite unrelentingly violent attack.

Inside Richard Serra ultimately plays out in a rather interesting fashion, although it feels more disconnected from the source material than I would have hoped, raising the ever-fascinating issue of the relationship between sound and conceptual source material. If I stretch, I can find symbolic relationships between the music’s activity and the stature and weight of Serra’s sculptures, perhaps most saliently in the relationship they instantiate between human and object. Serra’s sculptures, like Merzbow’s noise, may dominate the human figures they surround, but like Vian’s field recordings and melodic percussion that persists underneath the noise on this album, the sculptures rely on and require their surroundings for their power. (Jennifer Smart)