A recent Kottke post talks of listening to the sounds of new places while travelling, which reminded me of the quite excellent Audiotourism album by UK artist Freeform, who recorded sounds while travelling in Vietnam and China, then manipulated these skilfully to produce an and elastic and enchanting work, one which transforms street sounds into fluid percussive stabs and haunting melody. It’s a luscious work, followed up by an album of remixes : Audio-Tourism Reinterpretations, featuring Jan Jelinek, Bill Laswell and Autechre, and includes 30 minutes of his original sound recordings for the project on this too. Gorgeous stuff.
Like many artists exploring soundscapes & instrumental music production, Freeform eventually succumbed to using his voice on the recent release of Outside In. Again the splintery sculpted music is divine, but his wandering voice kills interest in the album for me. He’s not alone in pushing the voice to the front in bad ways though – T.Raumschmiere’s Blitzkrieg Pop album was another disappointing album from a favourite artist for me this year, with it’s range of trashy rock voices thrown on top. But then again, I’ve always loved the EL-P instrumental albums rather than the Cannibal-OX albums they were made for as backing tracks….