Run by our very own Joseph Sannicandro, the Lost Children Net Label has been quiet as a Bandcamp imprint, but kept alive through Joseph’s podcasts and newsletter posts since the 2022 release of the massive 56-track [Useless Sounds]. Returning in full force with a triptych of tapes, Lost Children is ready to reclaim its place at the forefront of experimental music.
The crown jewel of the bundle is CRACKS, a gathering of international musicians who address the “concept of the border as a colonial wound.” Proceeds benefit the Council on American-Islamic Relations Minnesota and Lumpen Radio (an initiative of the Public Media Institute in Chicago). The confrontational words on the cover have become a global rallying cry.
Joni Void starts the set off with “Borders,” cutting right to the chase. The percussion sounds like a jailer’s baton dragged across prison bars. A connection is made between physical borders, sonic borders and the borders of perception, with dialogue interrupted by the siren and blare of a local enforcement agent. Martín Rodríguez shares radio transmissions heard from the Arizona-Mexico border where he was raised, giving credit to radio for helping him to recover from a brain tumor. The transmissions sparkle and fade, as if underlining the name of the Lost Children imprint. One thinks of voices and souls lost and the search for missing loved ones, possibly deported, possibly dead. Kate Carr offers bucolic bells bisected by the essential chaos of street protests, suggesting that the comfortable must be disturbed in order for substantive change to unfold.
Lubo Alexandrov‘s bucolic “Echoes (from the other side)” doesn’t identify which side it refers to, leaving the interpretation wide open. Speaker Music‘s haunting, echoed, abraded and ultimately percussive “Moral Injury” exposes the deepest rupture of the crisis as an affront to goodness itself. Sannicandro’s own “rethink not reform” brings the sound to the streets, the appealing “Wait” of an electronic crossing signal contrasted with a sense that the fragile peace is about to be disturbed; in layers of increasing ferocity, it is. The disorientation of the intimate soundscape imitates that of the assaulted. apartment52‘s “i would die for anything, maybe” exposes a different insecurity while repeating the effect of messages that fail to get through.
A heartfelt live recording from Hamza Lahmadi connects the yearning of sojourners around the world, who just want a place to call home. Mai Mai Mai incorporates waves as siren call, implying both the hope of welcome and the lack of permission to land. The drone is lonely and isolated, the land right there. Anas Hajam lightens the mood a bit with finger-picking goodness and breath; one needs encouragement such as this. Then Joni Void returns as the remixer of Soledad Rosas‘ “Piel,” which extends the references to breath along with vocal glissandos and tender song. The intake just prior to the second minute recalls George Floyd.
Only a minute long, Esther B.‘s “molti sport” is a rush of static awaiting definition. Then comes a reference to Greek mythology: thenewobjective feat. Cole Pulice use “Scylla and Charybdis” to reference the idiom “the lesser of two evils,” summarizing the current state of border disputes, in which no one wins. Stefan Christoff closes the compilation with “Turn,” whose tolling church bells, echoed on prepared piano, are both indictment and call to arms.
Two artists featured on CRACKS also branch out across the bundle. ATMOSPHERICS is taken from a series of soundscape broadcasts prepared by Diana Duta & Stefan Christoff. Partially recorded on the silver anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, “Paysage sonare” is a tribute to victory, a long battle finally won. The sounds of the coast are sounds of peace in both senses of the word. Soft ambient tones unify the composition, wresting control from the field recordings in the tenth minute before ceding space in the eighteenth and again in the thirty-first, ending in familial laughter and joy.
Similar sounds launch the title track, recorded in Brussels. The piece eventually branches into the northern marshes, calling on hydrophones for a glance below the surface. The contrast between city and marsh recalls CRACKS: the discussion of desirable environments, “migration, political dissent and resistance.” The link becomes overt in the chants of the twenty-first minute. Again Christoff’s synth, along with pensive guitar, is the glue that holds the work together, although even this is lost in time, rescued from older tapes, a subtle metaphor. In the long aquatic segment that closes the piece, one feels retreat and resolution.
Esther B. is also Esther Bourdages, whose cassette Listening session, live concerts, figure skating “turns the turntable into a destructive instrument.” These live improvisations expose the turntable as preserver and destroyer of memory. Segments rise through the ether intact, only to be savaged with love. There’s a huge difference between turntablism in a hip-hop sense and turntablism in an experimental sense, but the two are not exclusive. In her preference for the older, even archival records, Bourdages honors The Caretaker; in her disdain for the creation of linear narratives or danceable samples, she honors Kid Koala. “figure skating” flips the script, conflating the stylus and the skate, the vinyl and the ice, with few if any identifiable markers until the end: a mesmerizing lesson in abstraction and a companion to Curling.
In “Earache, My Eye,” a horrified son protests to his father, “You ruined my record, man!” Such a thing does not exist in Bourdages’ world, where records are purposely altered by “grinding, cutting and sanding.” If anything, the imperfections are the draw. Yet it is obvious that the artist loves her collection, teasing sounds from these records that were never intended to be heard, like coaxing stories from a childhood friend. It is passing strange to hear them on a cassette, although in the hands of another this might be manipulated in a different way, then passed to a digital specialist for further dismantling. We once thought that sound, once recorded, was fixed; we believe so no longer. Welcome back, Lost Children! (Richard Allen)
a closer listen 