LP – Futura Resistenza

A series of dark, ethereal and spectral sequences on ‘A Wrong Turn Towards Eternity’, the 10-minute opening track introduce us to the latest work by Glaswegian sound artist Mark Vernon. Vernon is accustomed to a form of audio-archaeology characterised by the use and abuse of found tapes, home recordings and fragments of voices mixed with ambient sounds, to create a disturbing, restless and fascinating soundscape of memory. It is the urgent poetry of the everyday that perpetually returns in art and music to remind us that technologies – such as those used to record sound – shape emotions and perceptions, effectively transforming our being in the world. The Dramaturgy of Decay is artfully arranged with answering machine messages, distorted voices, recordings of laughter and applause, amateurishly played instruments and homely songs, all elements that are manipulated and reassembled, slowed down or sped up, deconstructed using multiple procedures, intermittently passing from a familiar register to a hallucinatory one. ‘All men have a secret attraction for ruins’ wrote Chateaubriand, and this fascination with the aesthetics of the sublime is now tinged with retrofuture considerations, or with an absence of time – as ultimately it is never clear when this disappearance occurs: during the artist’s compositional process, or during the listening process? A deep feeling of melancholy pervades the seven tracks that make up this album, a juxtaposition of heaven and the grave, of city and desert, where a sense of transience is implicit and takes place through subtraction and erosion. The Apollonian idea of ​​classical unity contrasts with the Dionysian idea of ​​fragmentation: ‘what remains’ – his imagery – becomes the constant engine of a sort of fantastic abandonment and of a new poetics, which continually changes over time, subject to evolution and then destruction.

 

Mark Vernon – The Dramaturgy of Decay