Angus Carlyle – In The Shadow Of The Silent Mountain

angus-carlyle-in-the-shadow-of-the-silent-mountain_web

digital + book – Gruenrekorder

While leafing through the essential but elegant booklet of In The Shadow Of The Silent Mountain and starting “Acqua Bianca”, the first of 8 files/compositions present in this digital album by Angus Carlyle for Gruenrekorder, we soon get the feeling of plunging into a point-like sound landscape. This landscape is characterized by natural sounds, at first hardly recognizable, then similar to something dripping, fluid, winter-like: maybe ice sheets breaking and snow under the boots. The various creakings then leave space for stronger sounds. In “Bells of Church” we find some descriptive field recordings (the bells, the flock to pasture, some southern Italian dialects typical of a rural setting). In “Fifty Breaths in the Valley” we find more repetition of sound effects, basically some echoes which are repeated and more shaded and attached to some dialogue fragments, all objects of sound editing. It’s nothing really special or aesthetically beautiful, but the work provides different questions to the expert listener. What is the strategy of this sound artist? What exactly is he trying to tell us, to explore or let us think about this audio experience? Undoubtedly the mix between sounds, words and images is not secondary: this mix was innate of any magical expression, W.S.Burroughs said, and of any artistic expression too, obviously. This inter-disciplinary mix refers to a different approach, which is more contemporary and abstract, and to a clear editorial choice (the physical sounds are not reported in the final package). All of this is apparently mostly related to the relationship between the experimenter and the sounds surrounding him. In this case the artist is in a specific environment of audio captures: the Piacentin mountains, in the Campania Apeninnes. According to Carlyle, sound art does not need to make sounds and this is enough to think that writing, or photography, or a film, may be considered sound art too. The main thing is showing the special link which is the base of the way we and the surrounding world are connected: maybe this is a limited strategy, but this strategy has its own charm too.

 

Angus Carlyle – In The Shadow Of The Silent Mountain