Can one remix reality? We do it all the time, as our minds revise, rewrite and reorganize our memories. Critique of Everyday Life’s William Selman performs a similar feat on Sanctioned Departures by arranging field recordings by categories. This “thematic tagging system” results in a quadrant of collages, embracing unexpected juxtapositions. Honoring its title, the artist sanctions (allows or disallows) the use of each individual source, sorting through a classification system more instinctive than clinical.
One would, for example, expect “Through Frozen Words” to include only cold recordings; yet Selman connects water to water by including both ice melt and sauna steam. To talk about something is often to talk about its opposite. One element may appear in different forms; a creature may metamorphose; chemicals may combine. “Through Frozen Words” sounds like liquid traveling through different phases; some may hear boiling water while others may hear bubbling soda. Electronic sheets meet sheets of rain.
These watery sounds extend into the title track, met by banks of gongs and drones. In the mind of the sorter, one evokes the other; in the listener, the tones bend and blend. Sounds overflow their traditional boundaries like travelers visiting new cultures. The gongs provide grounding, their slowly-unfurling melodies offering a form of sonic architecture. Buried words – perhaps a reference to the previous title – attempt to surface, only to be dragged down again.
“Outside the Window” juxtaposes howler monkeys and electromagnetic fields. While one would normally not associate one with the other, the curiosity is the fact that each has a form of language, one organic and the other inorganic. While scientists have researched patterns in the first, for the most part they have ignored patterns in the second, chalking them up to pareidolia.
Many of the prior elements recombine on “On Ground Level,” which includes gongs, drones and field recordings, a reminder that we move through a world in which sounds occur simultaneously: a plane over a park, a worker in a factory, a cable on the ocean’s floor. As surprising as the album’s juxtapositions may be to the naked ear, in reality they reflect our current biophony, geophony and anthropophony, neither tidy nor predictable, but glorious nonetheless. (Richard Allen)
a closer listen 