Seth Nehil Amnemonic Site CD (A28)
Seth Nehil has composed sound works for CD,
multi-speaker installation, solo and large-group concerts, dance, theater and multi-media performance.
Recordings include collaborations with jgrzinich and Olivia Block and solo works such as Tracing the Skins
of Clouds (1998); From Cloud to Seed (1999); Uva (2000); and Umbra (2002), among others. He has performed throughout the US, in Europe and Japan. Seth Nehil is also co-editor and designer of FO A RM magazine, a journal of arts and research with a focus on sound art.
This is Seth Nehil's first solo cd in 5 years.
Seth has written an essay about this work which you can read here (pdf).
REVIEWS:
Vital Weekly 569, March 2007, (Frans de Waard, Netherlands)
Perhaps Seth Nehil is better known from his collaborative work than for his solo work. He worked with jgrzinich and Olivia Block, but his last solo work was from 2002. In the years between he worked mainly on different projects that couldn't be released on CD, such as multimedia installations. The new work 'Amnemonic Site' is covered with obscurity. Besides his name, the title, label name and catalogue number, the cover holds no information. 'Play Loud' it says on the
label, which always raises the question here: why? I usually like to make up my own mind if I want to play music loud or not. The whole time I was playing this CD, I couldn't stop thinking 'what are these sounds'? It's of course a question that I constantly ask myself when playing new music, certainly when covers are as obscure as this one, but in Nehil's case, it can be anything really. Are these field recordings? Perhaps. Or closely miked objects? Also likely. And what about the nature of sound processing? It seems likely there is some. How and to what extent? And do I also detect some real instruments, like wind instruments, or perhaps organs? It's all likely. Each of the pieces is a large mix up, I imagined, of all of these. There is field recordings, closely miked objects falling to the wooden floor, but also long sustained sounds of wind instruments. It all makes up a particularly strong CD, that is very much alike the latest Olivia Block release, in which a similar treatment of 'real' instruments and field recordings is used, and Nehil easily reaches to a similar height in his 'Amnemonic Site'. Full of tension, he offers a strong interplay between all of his soundsources and it's easily the best release I heard from him to date.
Bagatellen, United States, May 2007 (Brian Olewnick)
Seth Nehil is interested in forgetting everything he knows about music. "I began imagining a culture in which the idea of music had been forgotten or never learned, but in which people insisted on the value and practice of collective sound-making activity. What would their 'music' sound like?" To this end, and after having experienced certain sonic immersions in "real life" such as an enormous welter of activity during a Chinese New Year celebration in Manhattan, he began investigating methods of blurring the distinctions between live and pre-recorded music and sounds, folding them into one another in systems and combinations that had as little as possible to do with his hardwired ideas of what music should be. "Amnemonic Site" is the first release documenting this idea. Of course, translating these concepts to the sonic sphere is another thing entirely. I’m sure I could have happily listened to the five tracks here without such thoughts ever flitting through my mind even though knowing this background might cause me to listen from a different angle. The first two pieces in particular don’t overtly straddle the music/non-music territories, at least as far as contemporary sounds go; they more comfortably fit into a similar electro-acoustic landscape as did the Matt Mitchell disc I wrote about last week, an extension of the areas explored by pioneers of the electronic avant of the 60s like Raaijmakers. You do ascertain certain elements that likely worked their way in from outside the studio, but they “read” as entirely akin to the (presumably) synthesized ones—their texture is essentially the same. This makes for a fine, shallow (not in a bad sense) spatial effect, one of sounds winging their way back and forth inside a narrow, metallic envelope before ending in a small spray of static clicks. The second section is muffled, anaerobic and severely claustrophobic, as though you’re drowning in heavy, flapping flannel. It’s effective and at the same time unpleasant though the organ-y chords and bloopy electronics that surface later on in the piece I could do without.
Over the last three portions, however, the work breaks out into the open and hits stride, Nehil’s expressed ideas (at least in retrospect) peeking aboveground for a glimmer or two. There’s a relationship between the sound world he’s exploring and that investigated by his sometime collaborator Olivia Block, a like affinity for open field noises with vague (hence enticing) narrative content. The layers of texture lap after one another, the soft drone, then the backwards-sounding thwacks and shuffles, the dully resonant taps, the thwacks taking on the character of burning wood, each element subtly rising and fading in volume, in degree of grain. Gradually, that third cut splays out into a play of high, reedy drones, what sounds like a bass flute (but undoubtedly isn’t) and faraway, impossible to decipher…voices? Almost out of the range of hearing, in any case. Those two sounds, the high whine and the low “flute” reappear at the beginning of track four, wedded to a lower, more clarinet-like bellow and a purer, medium range organ chord. The whole structure wells up, shedding clatter, coalescing into unintelligible voices and evaporating into a large, public interior space. Again, a moving, bracing “novella”. Amnemonic Site’s coda combines any number of the preceding elements (was that Chinese being spoken all along?) where that admixture of inside and outside gets its clearest demonstration. Impossible for me to say if Nehil accomplished his stated goal or if, indeed, it’s a possible thing to do with recorded media. But the disc works real well as an extended “story”, building in waves toward some perceptible, if indescribable, whole.
Tranzistor.gr, Greece, June 2007 (Nicolas Malevitis)
... the train is leaving from drama's station, if i had a few more days to spent i would have stopped again for a couple in this city, which no matter how small it is, it haunted me the first time i visited her 2 years ago. super people & super situations i lived! slowly emerge from my discman the sounds of seth nehil's 'amnemonic site', recorded between 2004-2006, drops like a real bomb after almost a 5 year silence at least regarding his solo works, with the exception of being the director of 'foarm' fanzine and some collaborations w/ his pal jgrnich. it's not simple electroacoustic or ambient music, it's a sound game w/ sounds crafted so harmonic kai bult/tied between them that they nail you down as riveted is at the moment am listening to them the ride w/ the train through the channels of the nestos river, in my opinion together w/ the part that starts at the moment the train leaves the station of 'bralos' 'till it passes through eleutherohori (through or close to the gorge of the asopos river w/ the old machine gun nests that hang as abadonded small towers in the middle of nowhere) perhaps make it as 2 of my favest landscapes regarding the train rides around greece. so as is the release, captures my heart as one of my favest releases so far for 2007!!!
