By Nick Ostrum
A field far beyond form and emptinessis a return to form. It is Lance Austin Olsen and Jamie Drouin’s first musical collaboration in six years, following a period marked mostly visual arts projects, some joint work on comic books, and an extended bout with Covid. And as with previous recordings, it features Drouin and Olsen on a range of instruments acoustic - dulcimer, cello, piano, children’s and trainer guitars, objects – and not – radio, laptop, amplifiers. Likewise, as with their previous collaboration, this one focuses on unconventional techniques coupled with a lot of frictive and crumbly percussions and Drouin’s electronic manipulations.
The result is a noirish soundtrack to the equally dark and perplexing comics they released a few years ago. Sounds are ephemeral and together evoke a disjointed assemblage of incidental and environmental sounds from a radio play. Woody clicks spatter across one ear. Dramatic tinny dulcimer chords and a lone piano key pock the other. Then silence, and hums, and a quick tumble of acousmatic clatter. One can only imagine what, if anything, is lurking behind it all, the creaks of a settling house, a clumsy cat, or some more ominous disturbance gathering. Breaking the acousmatic spell, a news reporter intervenes at 21:, announcing “The shortages have been fueled by US sanctions.” An extended hum follows, which opens into a period of silence, then a busy minute-long stretch of rummaging.
Silent intervals fill much of the space, serving not only as markers of subtle change but also curious spaces of musical sound in the Cagean sense. They also give the listener time to process and wonder before the next brief flutter of activity. In sense, the core of a fieldmay very well be these loose agglomerations of sounds and the silence, the connective tissue holding it all together. However, one could also flip that equation, as the sound elements are imposed and intrude upon the underlying silent base, which could be the titular field that transcends shape and order but is also pregnant with possibilities. Whichever way one may consider the album – as sounds on silence or intervallic silence amidst sound - the listener is left to wonder what all this space and abstraction is about. It is something unpleasant, for sure. It also says something about the uncertainty of today, as the sanctions report, just one of two spoken insertions, hints. If anything, that contemporary ambiguity and precarity can be a menacing and lonely place, albeit with the dialectical potential for calm and beauty.
a field far beyond form and emptinessis available as a download from Bandcamp:
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