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Some Memories of Bamboo | Angus Carlyle
Gruen 053 | Audio CD | 65:34 min | Digipack > [order]
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Kami-Katsura is a small suburban district in Kyoto, Japan. Bounded to the east by residential and light industrial areas that run up to the Hozu River, to the west it is held in check by wooded slopes and valleys where the population falls away as the altitude gently climbs. For all the movement of people and vehicles, the district exudes a certain tranquillity which is reflected in the acoustic atmospheres from before dawn until after dusk.
Angus Carlyle spent three weeks over a period of two years walking up and down a parcel of land measuring 500 metres long and no more than 100 metres wide, looking, listening and recording. Although it was the inspiration behind his return to the Kami-Katsura district, he never quite managed to capture the striking sounds of a bamboo forest animated by wind that he had first heard on his visit in 2006.
Other acoustic events did make their way into his microphones: rain dripping into a cemetery watering-can; the heavy passage of the maroon trains of the Hankyu company gleaming north and south on the Arashiyama Line; the hubbub of one café and the more subdued mood of another; the river bubbling and sliding through the valley, birds and insects marking out the air with their noises; people wandering the forest trail or crossing the asphalt roads.
In “Some Memories of Bamboo”, these unprocessed recordings have been stitched together to evoke the heard life of Kami-Katsura, the district’s textures offered more colour through the short stories that accompany each track in the CD booklet.
Tracklist
01. Kiyosumi ▼
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02. Another Level
03. Kaeru: The Return
04. Two Cafés
05. Bamboo Harvest
06. Walkthrough
07. 4 a.m. Jyoujyuji
08. Bird In The Bush
09. Dawn Town
10. Saihoji Gawa ▼
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11. A Quiet Storm
12. Bus Is Bas, Train Is Densha
13. Shitsuren Shimashita ▼
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The CD was made possible through generous financial assistance from the Daiwa Anglo Japanese Foundation and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation.
Sounds and Words: Angus Carlyle | Design: Tobias Schmitt
Field Recording Series by Gruenrekorder
10 Tracks (65:34 min) / CD (500 copies)
Gruenrekorder / Germany / 2009 / Gruen 053 / LC 09488 / EAN 4050486001660
Will Montgomery | The Wire / Issue: #311
[...] For a moment while shuffling through these recordings, I thought that Angus Carlyle was a marine mammal, a seal on some Nordic shore, perhaps. As it turns out, it was just his snores. "Dawn Town" features an early morning recording of a Japanese Buddhist temple ceremony taking place near where Carlyle was staying – the phonographer fell asleep at the mic. The recordings on Some Memories of Bamboo were made over several visits to Kami-Katsura, a small suburban district in Kyoto. His method as a recordist is indirect, anecdotal and sometimes hesitant. A feeling of missed opportunities pervades this release – frogs that don’t perform, elusive atmospheres, memories that can’t be reconstructed. But that’s just what Carlyle’s getting at in both the recordings and the accompanying notes. Taken together, they communicate the flavour of ungraspability that attracts Carlyle to the region. [...]
Tobias Fischer | Tokafi
Silent stories from Japan: Subtle sounds embedded into a sonic scenery of peace and tranquility.
What is it that defines a field recorder? What turns a man walking around with a microphone into a phonographer? When does the acoustic world around us become a piece of art? It is questions like these that have occupied Angus Carlyle for the better part of the past decade. His work has accompanied, analysed, interpreted and inspired the development of field recordings from a vague term to a fully-fledged genre fanning out into anything from sound art to philosophy. Throughout, he has sought to reconcile the documentary nature of the trade with the freedom to just listen: His approach has been scientific, yet passionate. It has been minutely detailed yet offered far-reaching implications. It is grounded in academic insight but never looses sight of the senses.
Vice versa, his pieces have occasionally come to complex conclusions but they have always strived for clarity first. „Autumn Leaves“, a compendium he edited in 2007, constituted a pinnacle of sorts in this respect. A combination of articles essays and interviews, of textual, graphic and photographic work, of a painstakingly edited book and a massive three-hour online-compilation, it invited in everyone who had something meaningful to say about the subject, bridging substyles and niches, scenes. communities and international borders. If he’d decided to forever revert to silence afterwards, these words would have made for some famous last ones indeed.
Even though he didn’t, „Some Memories of Bamboo“ is tellingly as close as one can possibly sneak up to pure silence while still carefully covering it with sound. „Filling the canvas“ can, of course, be done with the most minimal of means. Here, however, the canvas itself appears translucent and silky, a sonic figment rather than the typical foundation for colour, code and concepts. Perhaps this is down to the personal motivations for the project: Carlyle has traveled back and forth between his hometown of London, where he occupies the position of Reader in Sound Arts Practice at the University of the Arts and Kami-Katsura, a tiny suburban district in Japan. His discovery of this quiet oasis was, as he admits, accidental. Still, the deep bond he established with the area and its people marks it as a fateful accident. His introductory description of Kami-Katsura alone feels like poetry: „Bounded to the East by residential and light industrial areas that run up to the Hozu river, to the West it is held in check by wooded slopes and valleys where the population falls away as the altitude gently climbs.“
So what can you actually hear on this album? Mostly, very subtle sounds embedded into a sonic scenery of peace, tranquility and daily life unfolding at an unhurried pace. Scenes at a cafe: The clatter of cups on ceramic, the faint echo of background music, the muffled chatter of guests. A walk along a bamboo grove: The rustling of footsteps in the grass, the chirping and chanting of birds, the dreamy drone of a helicopter in the distance. Morning ritual at the Jyoujyuji temple: Coarse and throaty mantras, the rhythmical sounding of deep bells, the cool air of the enveloping darkness. A short break at the riverbank: Water babbling joyously, dripping absent-mindedly, gushing playfully. As Carlyle points out, this world contains „all the amenities you would expect from a living high street“, including „supermarkets, florists, bakers, hairdressers, restaurants and a post office“. And yet, he finds wonder in the most inconspicuous places: The electrical hum and pointillist signalling of a railway crossing turn into a seven and a half minute long miracle. And the voice of an old Japanese lady hauntingly ebbs away, as she murmurs ancient songs about the memory of spirits.
From Carlyle’s perspective, movements of men and notions of nature have been reduced to the metaphorical motions of a pantomime: You can hear voices, but their timbre is more important than what they are saying. You can identify animals and plants, but their outlines remain ephemeral and hazy. Likewise, Carlyle hasn’t edited himself out of the recordings, but even though he appears on various tracks as an interviewer, a speaker or merely as an invisible narrator, his presence remains elusive and has been entirely embedded into a gentle cloud of sound. You can almost imagine him floating through town like a ghost, listening in to people’s conversations without them noticing. As casual and carefree as some of these works sound, though, they are always the result of a carefully-planned probing-process. To capture a very particular quality of the bamboo harvest, for example, Carlyle returned to Kami-Katsura several times, never quite able to get hold of that powerfully snapping sensation he experienced on his first visit. In the end, what remained was a field of allusions, quiet clusters of wood rubbing against each other on a „dense carpet of dry leaves“.
There is an extensive introduction to the album and Carlyle has included highly personal liner notes to each of the thirteen scenes in the booklet. There can be no doubt that these notes serve to deepen the impact of the record, adding even more concrete images to the already vivid pictures the ear has managed to create on its own. And yet, „Some Memories of Bamboo“ is an effective counterpoint to the prejudice that field recordings are worthless without knowledge of their context. As one gradually delves into this jade-coloured fantasm, each element is revealing its purpose and the sequencing, as chronologically distorted as it may be, appears to follow an undeniable logical.
The duties of a field recorder and a writer, then, are not all that different: Where others can detect nothing but noise, they uncover structures. Where most will see routines, they will discover stories. And where some will hear silence, they will see beauty. Carlyle’s voice may sometimes die down to a whisper, but there is plenty of the latter to be found here.
Having initially come to Kami-Katsura, a small suburban district in North West Kyoto, Japan, by accident, Angus Carlyle found himself so seduced by the tranquility of its acoustic atmospheres that he subsequently returned to compile three weeks of recordings of a land area 500 metres long and 100 metres wide. Some Memories of Bamboo is the first solo CD from Carlyle, a writer and sound recordist who works at the University of the Arts, London and co-curated the Sound Escapes exhibition at Space in London. The sixty-five-minute release effectively documents his interest in merging anthropology and sound art into an “arresting geography of the ear,” a conceptual field where the visual gives way to the auditory.
The listener vicariously moves through the environments alongside Carlyle who explores natural and man-made locales in equal measure. At a picnic, an infant named Kiyosumi babbles while splashing stones into a stream; cheerful muzak floats through the background while customers rustle newspapers and dishes clatter (“Two Cafes”); chirping birds, buzzing insects, and a frog’s soft croak are heard at a river’s edge (“Kaeru: The Return”); and drums, tolling bells, and chants emanate from a nearby Jyoujyuji temple (“4 a.m. Jyoujyuji”). During “Another Level,” a crossing’s insistent warning signal forecasts the arrival of Hankyu Company trains as they pass through the Arashiyama Line, while “Bamboo Harvest” documents Carlyle’s frustrated attempts to capture the creaking trunks, crinkling leaves, and cracks of the titular tree. Elsewhere, feet clump along the ground, thunder accompanies a deluge of rainwater, a bus clatters on a rocky road, and plips, plops, gurgles and trickles resound by a riverbank.
Carlyle’s recording certainly receives a deluxe presentation from Gruenrekorder. The tall CD case format includes a multi-page booklet inside that features the producer’s background detail for each of the release’s thirteen scenes (a shame the text is set in upper case rather than the more readable upper &lower case), all of which aids the listener in visualizing the settings. As fascinating an aural document as it is, prospective listeners should note that Some Memories of Bamboo is a field recordings project in the purest sense, with Carlyle allowing the materials to work their magic in their natural form. Not all listeners, truth be told, are as captivated by the rise and fall of car engine sounds, the movement of a motorcycle coming closer and moving away, and the textural abundance of city noises. Still, those who like a little music to sweeten their field recordings could turn to the final track, “Shitsuren Shimashita,” wherein an older woman, a silk scarf around her throat, leans against the railing by the Gawa stream and sings a sad and lonely song. November 2009
Frans de Waard | VITAL WEEKLY
Germany’s Gruenrekorder label sometimes has money to burn – well sometimes. Maybe the artist chips in some money too? I never heard of Angus Carlyle, but apparently he visited the Kami-Katsura, a small suburban district of Kyoto, Japan and recorded there this work, in thirteen scenes. Each of them comes with a description of the specific site, which is nice to read, but of course doesn’t compare with seeing the real thing. Its not an area I visited, I think, when I was in Kyoto. Like so many of the Gruenrekorder releases, this one too deals with pure, unprocessed field recordings. Very tranquil, this particular neighborhood, I assume, as most of these pieces consist of very few sounds. Bird twitter, a car passing, few human interaction, water sounds and that’s it. Surely nice to hear, but I wonder: by whom? I think, I prefer that people compose with sounds like this, rather than present them as they are. Surely nice enough though. Made me wanting to go back to Japan.