Brandon LaBelle – Dirty Ear

Brandon LaBelle

CD – Errant Bodies
Field recordings, very atypical sounds and effects, envelopes unraveled in a series of documentary micro-narrations, carefully divided into different settings and limited spaces. The nine “Dirty Ear” tracks can be seen as a hypothetical prototype of studies on mobility and broadcasting, harking back to auditory dreams in precisely localized places. And although they can be private, public, metropolitan or rural spaces – not much will eventually change in regard to the determination of suggestions; they are always kept deliberately aleatory. These suggestions are playing more with the construction of the atmosphere than on following random paths for “catching” sounds. Brandon LaBelle composes an aesthetic of the everyday that is never naive, referring to the landscape more as a cultural and semiotic construct. He generates new acoustic opportunities for interaction, redefining his own specific grammars of understanding and manipulation of places. A very sophisticated project, which takes listening to the sense of transience with “stolen voices and undesirable stories”, “eavesdropped conversations”, “space invasions and wire-tappings”, while assembling residual materials that are hard to catalogue, but which posses certain effectiveness and charm.