home > browse > cd-feature > view article

CD Feature/ toy.bizarre & Dale Lloyd: "s/t"

  Tobias

It has become a universally acknowledged and accepted fact that field recordings and drones go together like brother and sister. In my opinion this has to do with the fact that the combination possibly mirrors the world we live in more plastically than any other, thanks to its unification of the technological and the organical. And yet it would not suffice simply placing Cedric Peyronnet and Dale Lloyd in this corner, bunching them together with myriads of artists who merely use field recordings as an additional element to deepen their ambiances. Rather, they regard the aural capacities of specific places as the clay with which to make their emotional perceptions tangible and to communicate them to others. As this album shows, the result is always more than just randomly pointing the microphone somewhere.

Which makes sense if you really think about it. After all, as long as you can not actually see the space which is to be described, field recordings will only be able to conjure up images from inside you own imagination. Their power may lie in digging up images you never knew you carried around with you, but which naturally bear no real connection to the taped events. When Peyronnet (the man behind toy.bizarre) uses the noises of a well, of wind, wood, insects and birds from his parents’ village and home on his twenty minute long contribution, he does not want the listener to experience these from scratch, but to put themselves in his place and feel their way through his personal and private perspective. He is not an objective spectator, quite on the contrary, he willfully rearranges the different parts to arrive at the picture in his head, without caring whether or not they match reality or not. On the other hand, his method naturally relies on the certainty that this so-called reality does not exist at all. If every sensation is merely a stimulation of neuro-receptors in the brain, then this brooding, menacing, convulsing, clustering mass, which leaps from a howling thundercloud into a picture of majestic quietude, is just as real: You lie in your sleeping bag under a clear black sky, your hand clasps a bottle of red whine and your gaze roams the stars, as the sounds of the surrounding wood engulf you. Dale Lloyd, too, has entered the forest for “From Dayspring to Eventide: Within the Green Half-Light”, a composition which equally relies on environmental recordings, but glides by much more subtly, vaporously and almost elph-like. It is the little miracles and wonders of nature Lloyd is after, the majesty of the minuscule details, the moments when your spiritual center is on the same wavelength as the glowing treetops ahead of you. Finely woven crackles as if from burning glass melt with two layers of irredescent harmonic breaths and the subliminal bubbling of water at the gate and after you’ve entered, nothing remains but the whispers of all those tiny creatures lurking at you from behind their veil of darkness. And yet, this music is warm and friendly, never creepy or frightening.

Lloyd’s work seems less constructed than Peyronnet’s, but that it is not only an illusion brought forth by conscious decisions on the part of the creators, but also a totally irrelevant parameter: It is not the degree to which these tracks have been reworked, manipulated or moulded into something different within the confinements of the studio environment, but the degree to which they approximate the emotive landscape that caused their genesis in the first place. The result is instantly understandable and quite unacademic: An album which has all the potential of becoming a dear friend.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: toy.bizarre/Cedric Peyronnet
Homepage: Dale Lloyd
Homepage: Bremsstrahlung Recordings