Artist : Matthew Collings
Album : Silence Is A Rhythm Too
Year : 2014
Genre : Ambient
Quality : 232kbps / 44.1KHz / Joint Stereo
Source : CD
Playtime : 0h 43m
Size : 76.63mb
Label : Denovali Records
Catalognr : DEN207
Tracklist:
01. Stills 6:24
02. Everything You Love Will End Up On The Breeze 3:42
03. Cicero 5:40
04. Toms 8:48
05. I Am Made Of Endless Hours 7:47
06. Silence Is A Rhythm Too 11:28
Releasenotes:
MATTHEW COLLINGS is a Scotland-based composer. Not only being a solo recording
and live artist, he collaborates regularly with artists from all kinds of fields
including musicians (e.g. Dag Rosenqvist from JASPER TX and Denovali label mate
TALVIHORROS), dancers and filmmakers. He's responsible for several installations
using custom-made software, which have been exhibited at Burning Man Festival in
San Francisco or Glasgow's Centre for Contemporary Arts. His work for films
includes a specially commissioned live score for Dziga Vertov's 1929 silent
classic, 'The Man with the Movie Camera' and an invitation to work on 'The
Invisibles', a commission from Amnesty International. Before settling down in
Edinburgh, he lived in Iceland for six years, where he wrote a number of albums
issued under the name of his lo-fi/ambient project "Sketches for Albinos" and
where he met fellow collaborator Ben Frost. His music can be roughly described
as 'an elemental whorl of electro-acoustic (de)composition' (Boomkat.com),
ranging from tiny delicate moments of intimacy to all consuming noise. Strongly
influenced by avant-garde guitar music, it calls the minimal music of Steve
Reich or Gavin Bryars to mind in like manner. Having received remarkable praise
for his debut "Splintered Instruments", Denovali Records is re-releasing the
debut album accompanied by the release of his new and second full length album
entitled "Silence Is A Rhythm Too".
While looking back to an extensive period of creating music with his ambient
project "Sketches for Albinos" Collings felt the urgent necessity of starting
with a completely different approach to music, as the ambient aesthetic didn't
match any longer with new ideas burgeoning in his head. He wanted to create a
more direct sound to involve a much grander and more dangerous range of
emotions. The composition process of "Splintered Instruments" came out of
personally reckoning with two contrary forces, something vicious and unrelenting
challenging with a soft and kind energy û getting to their core and the dynamic
interrelation to one another Filtered through melody and vaguely resembling
songs, driven by nested rhythm patterns, one can imagine that the first sound
Collings picked up on as a leading impulse "was like Sonic Youth's 'The Diamond
Sea' meeting 'Music for 18 Musicians'. I wanted to take songs and kind of
dissolve them and then bring them back again, with everything just being on the
edge of these various types of structures."
He worked closely with Ben Frost on the creation of "Splintered Instruments",
who took influence in the physicality and size of sound and helped to achieve
him to reach into the deepest parts of human nature, pulling it out in a
hybrid-pop-experimental-noise form. According to Collings, the record is "a
revolt against machines" understanding the sense of precision as something
pretty unnatural. He avoids working with computers only using them for
convenience, not as a principle. 90% of the record is organic sourced from or
played on acoustic instruments or objects, being drawn to sound of every kind
which is more human, more imperfect in its subtle variations. Splintered
Instruments 'àis not about noise or the decibel levels û it's about the sheer
uncompromised approach to raw sound design' (Headphone Commute).
The title of the record 'Silence Is A Rhythm Too' goes back to a line from a
1980ies punk/new wave song by The Slits called 'In The Beginning There Was
Rhythm', though Collings has mostly been pre-occupied creatively by an idea of
painter Mark Rothko upon creating the album. Following Rothko's statement, that
the only things worth making art about were romance, tragedy and death, Collings
condensed and transferred this thought to the antithesis of life and death
represented by noise and silence. "Silence Is A Rhythm Too" isn't conceived as
the absence of sound like a Cageian silence that is simply a span of time that
is empty, but rather how silence and sound can be processed in a composition.
Collings interest is musically based on huge densities of sound just as he's
fascinated by opposing forces to wrestle with each other. Silence seems to be
harder and harder to achieve in this technologically saturated age and Matthew
Collings admits that it reveals the habits of his own hearing, from being
obsessed with its opposite: noise. "Silence Is A Rhythm Too" is about trying to
find grace, space and expanse as much as tension and menace, and reconciling the
two.
Stepping away from song-like structures, which filled his previous record,
"Splintered Instruments", Collings creates more spacious sounds and evokes the
impression of time stretched through the three dimensions. Still being intrigued
by the idea of materials on the edge of collapse, he catches them up in their
dying breath: The record is full of these processes, including prepared
amplifiers and electronics pushed to the extreme to coax new sounds,
close-micing and high volume. Despite the fact that most of his work is mediated
by technology, he's far more excited by the sound of acoustic. Featuring brass
ensembles and a string quartet the instruments and sounds are full of cracks,
breath, embedding rough materials informed by luscious intentions. "Silence Is A
Rhythm Too" keeps an eye on the small textural details as it is about harmony
and physicality in the moment where silence and noise meet.
http://denovali.com/matthewcollings/