A theory holds that constraints in any creative discipline force artists to dig deep and get more resourceful in their approach to problem solving. While it’s perhaps reductive, or worse, to think of COVID-19 as a kind of restraint, there’s no denying that its periods of lockdown unleashed a torrent from artists forced to face themselves within the confines of their homes while devising new ways of continuing their work.
Artists from all over the world are still releasing material that they began during that time. One of the recent standouts is Chelidon Frame’s Flatline Voyages (released on the Difficult Art And Music label).
Alessio Premoli, aka Chelidon Frame, writes that he found himself during the days of lockdown listening to his shortwave radio with a greater focus and intent, brought on by feelings of enforced isolation. Much of the material he captured from that time forms the basis for FV. Using sound processors to shape what he discovered, while enlisting the help of fellow Italian musicians Andrea Marinelli, Asymmetric Cut, A Distant Shore, and MDC to add musical color on a couple of tracks, Premoli fashioned a living soundscape that kept him connected to the world while offering him a new approach to his work.
The album begins with bouncing metallic tones sounding like dread-filled, low-end notes on a piano, which are soon buttressed and surrounded by growling throbs, arrhythmic scrapes, and a howling wind. Out of this slow-moving maelstrom comes a welter of voices, speaking and singing, staggered and layered, syllable edges frayed with static or squelched like a voice on a taxi radio, all of them elbowing forward to claim a space. As their informal convocation gradually breaks up, a crisply plucked string instrument floats in to offer a musical interlude before the restless current running through the album sweeps everything aside.
Over the course of its sprawling sixty-five minutes, FV offers up towering, resonant atmospheres shot through with drifting spoken shards. Frantic, shouting loops loom in the foreground, blocking out the horizon, before fading and passing back to make room for hectoring preachers and bland broadcasters. The staticky swoops, clicks, and swishes of shortwave atmospheric sound, the mysterious, fleeting ephemera of numbers stations, snippets of talk radio and news programs, slivers of artificially enthusiastic radio jingles, the babble of languages not your own: all of them swirl up before the listener and momentarily mesmerize before drifting away in this sonic kaleidoscope.
Though it’s demarcated into nine individual tracks, the album runs through as a near-seamless totality, a profuse multitude of cultures, textures, and segmented talk. Along the way, Premoli’s disembodiment and recontextualization of his random chattering humans transforms their presence to something almost purely musical, making of them conveyors of sound and rhythm, set free from meaning and intent. Yet the effect isn’t dehumanizing. The warmth of his sensitive touch keeps all of the transmissions feeling recognizably human and real. With Flatline Voyages, Chelidon Frame has created a world of his own – made from this one, yet distinctly otherworldly.
On a similar wavelength, Ground Waves, the second installment in a proposed trio of albums by Relay Station (released on the Adventurous Music label), is also sourced in part from the transmission of captured and processed radio waves. Like Flatline Voyages, it too is made up of individual tracks, in this case seven, and the album, for all its textures and moods, plays out as a unified whole. GW is also decidedly otherworldly. But this is where similarities with Flatline Voyages end.
Disregarding the listener’s understanding that GW was necessarily recorded, assembled, and mastered by someone, there’s very little on it to suggest the slightest trace of a human presence. From start to finish, one is taken through what sounds like a series of haunted, harrowing soundscapes, ancient transmissions from decommissioned satellites, stirred up and sent sailing by solar flares.
On the longer tracks, “Ground Wave III” and “I,” sick-making, wall-to-wall drones warble and arrhythmically throb. Subterranean bass pressures send up moans as tectonic plates shift and grind. Unseen beings spray random blasts of scouring, hissing static. Abandoned trip hammers and pile drivers heedlessly batter, bash, and demolish. Above it all, grim metallic airwaves freeze the atmosphere in which radar pings anemically beep. “Ground Wave IV” squashes and stretches with the throbbing ambience of shortwave transmissions, but it also crackles with static, isolated metallic strikes, serrated gusts, and manic gamelan-style percussive outbursts. The overall effect is enveloping and hypnotically dire.
The scattered shorter tracks offer respite of a sort, if only in their brevity. On “Ground Wave VI,” gelid pads hover like toxic, crystalline clouds over a brownfield while “Ground Wave II” is all subdued menace, alien buzz, and unnerving piping tones that sound almost human – but are more disturbing because they so clearly aren’t.
Ground Waves is a captivating, uncanny album, a darkly fascinating hallucination that stays with you after you emerge from it. One can only wonder what Relay Station has in store for the last installment. (Damian Van Denburgh)
a closer listen 