Exformal Records - Exformal Zones

A Closer Listen

Copenhagen’s Exformal Records is less than a year old, and is making a major move with its latest batch. Mads Kjeldgaard’s label launched as an experimental imprint, its highlight to date a 12-hour album from the founder himself, originally available with a bag of tea. The newest expression is a field recording series titled Exformal Zones: A Practice of Presence.  With matching graphic design, these four releases beg to be played and enjoyed together, and in one fell swoop more than double the label’s output to date.

There are four possible places to begin, but as the shortest release, Bella Comson‘s single As Far as the Sea Can Reach makes a fine introduction.  The four-minute track plunges us into the heart of the shore, with active but not turbulent surf lulling the listener into a sense of peace.  Recorded on a “thin strip of land dividing two seas,” the track can easily serve as a metaphor for the human condition, or can be enjoyed on its own merits.

Should one wish to hear more sounds of the sea, LFSaw‘s Tapaluche Waves is waiting, a single 26-minute piece that unfolds like a composition.  One can hear the waves approaching, receding, drawing little pebbles back in their wake.  The wind blows against the microphone.  As one listens, one remembers that no two waves are the same; they approach from different angles at different speeds, producing variances in volume.  Gradually the tension grows, palpable in the ninth minute and breaking in the tenth, sounding more like the cover photo, which portrays the island cliffs of La Gomera.  Where is Gomera, one might ask?  Off the coast of Africa, the third smallest of the eight Canary Islands.  While La Gomera does have surfing spots, many are meant for experienced surfers only.  As one listens, one can hear the unpredictability of the surf, which began in such linear fashion before jutting off into angles, against rocks and into tidal pools.  When in Tagaluche, one might be better advised to stick to the trails, investigate the springs, and eat wild strawberries wherever they may be found.  The track recedes to a quiet ending like a needle in a groove.

Mads Kjeldgaard‘s ten-minute piece, Life in the Quiet Zone, arrives in two distinct versions, narrated and unnarrated.  Each has its own appeal, and again one has a choice: to listen first with context or without.  The audio essay addresses the so-called “Quiet Zone” within Copenhagen’s S-train system, which of course is anything but quiet.  Kjeldgaard’s voice is warm and soothing, the type of voice that one might want to hear in such an environment, a counter-balance to the occasional human and mechanical cacophony.  As Kjeldgaard explains, all trains in Denmark have such a designation.  The fact the glass door often cannot open serves as a metaphor for chronic noise pollution and its effect on those who cannot escape.  A curious antithetical feeling develops: as the narrator reports, “You are supposed to unwind here, and instead your listening is sharpened.”  The essay makes a fine grown-up companion to The Quiet Book, exposing contradictions while yearning for a definition of quiet that in the end is far different from silence.

Finally (or first, depending on where on starts) we arrive at Giuseppe Pisaro‘s Street Phonography, described as “a collection of field recordings made while searching for something else.”  An hour and a quarter in length, the album is the longest and most comprehensive of the quartet, offering a wealth of disparate sounds.  Children play in the opening piece as ducks squawk for food and planes pass overhead; toward the end, a sound like scissors, or trousers rubbing together.  In the extended “The Pier is a free jazz drummer,” the artist makes an aural connection between disciplines, and the analogy fits.  The sea reappears in “Gennaio a Casalvelino, che era Cuba,” drawing a bow around the set.  Different shores bring different sounds and different spectators.  The birds of Yuen Po sound like human babies, a disconcerting effect.  Street fairs, radios and transport abound; these are not quiet zones.  “Bioluminescence” comes as a relief, the water pure and clear.  One imagines this as a single trip but knows it is not. Instead, one might consider this a different sort of trip, continuing the essay of the prior release: an investigation of sound and silence, cacophony and quietude.  Pisaro may have been searching for something else, but found an unexpected treasure; the same holds true for this alluring series. (Richard Allen)