Sounding 002 — An Adjacent Chamber
The second Sounding leaves the single composition behind for a whole mix — a guest set I made for Fort Evil Fruit’s Vortex of Ironic Calamities (episode 14) on Éist. It extends the world of God Is Everything You Are Not, an album that formed in the wake of a recurring dream: a lost sister returning through voice. I have always thought that the sounds we are drawn to reveal something before we can name it — that they recognise us first. I returned to these tracks because they share a tension I know from the album: tenderness with abrasion inside it, repetition thickening into trance, a chronic melancholy that turns almost physical. What follows moves the way the mix moves, so I’ll walk it in order.
It begins inside a film. Philippe d’Aram’s La découverte du château, from the score to Jean Rollin’s La Morte Vivante, opens on a promise between two women — sealed in blood in childhood, carried past death — and that promise becomes the thread the rest of the mix follows. The track is pure sentiment. I think of the scene where she climbs from the basement into the house, touching the photographs with her long, bloodied nails, as if she had become an abandoned house of her own life, trying to remember what once belonged to her.
From there the mix descends. In Pauline Anna Strom’s Rain On Ancient Quays we are at a small basement window, and the rain is never background — it turns tactile, almost architectural, as if the weather had come inside and begun to think alongside you. Then, with Behrooz Moosavi’s As I Sat Down Watching You, we fall further inward, into the texture of memory itself: vast, but reaching us only in fragments, a rhythmic voice suspended as though inside the engine of a memory at the moment it blows open.
The walls fall away. Törnekrona / Crown of Cerberus’s Virtue of Silence puts us outside and moving — crossing a city at night with nowhere to be, surrounded by light and detached from all of it, where silence is not peace but a low-resolution kind of pressure. Somewhere in that night I reach for a telephone. Alice Kemp’s a gold blade to the back of the head sounds like a presence on the other-other side of the line, a voice caught in the act of trying to come through — hysteria and restraint at once, unprocessed thoughts pushing out through a thin, insect-like channel. This is the mix’s closest approach to the dream that began the album: a voice on its way back, not yet arrived.
And then a voice does arrive, fully and roughly human. Ghédalia Tazartès’s Soul-1 carries beauty and coarseness in the same breath — the feeling of wrinkled hands, of something lived through, damaged, held in the body and still offered up. Ros Sereysothea answers from another world: the Queen of the Golden Voice, on ស្នាមលោហិតទិព្វសង្វា, singing of a snake’s bite and begging her husband to come — sweetness and panic in the same line, the melody bright over a drum so clean it sounds exposed.
For a moment the grief learns to move. Caroline K’s Animal Lattice keeps the sadness alive but sets it walking, playful without being light — a dream you cannot be sure you have woken from, smiling from inside the melancholy rather than out of it. Then the mix begins to evaporate. D.Å.R.F.D.H.S.’s Tandavas Danssälskap Framför Den Finska Valsen leaves you on the cold edge of a city, in an empty studio, waltzing alone: repetition becoming movement, movement becoming a ritual that continues even when no one is left to watch.
By the close, melody has given way to drone. Fluisteraars’s Der Kunst moves on wind and heartbeat-like pulses, a hypnosis with a physical weight to it — weather entering the body. It does not end so much as leave an after-effect: the sound continues after it has stopped, and the listener becomes a pendulum, still swinging once the music is gone.
And then the pendulum swings back into the waking world. The broadcast doesn’t end with that drone; it turns, hard, into a Voivod mix — thrash metal after a séance, all velocity and steel where the guest set was all interior and hush. It’s a violent hinge, and I’ve come to think it belongs. A world with no interior, all surface and dread, the face that isn’t there. If the guest set is the chamber where the returned dead are tended, the Voivod mix is the noise the living make on the other side of the wall — to stay awake, to keep moving, to survive the tenderness. The sister returns through voice; the thrash is the sound of the body that has to go on living without her.
