This beautiful recording is largely sourced from a performance of Craig Hilton playing the guzheng. The first track, Sans Mouvement I, is a relatively untreated sound recording of Hilton bowing the guzheng, with a slight reverb applied—creating a blissfully full sound that envelops the room. Only toward the end of the track does an insect-like digital flicker appear in the music, giving the listener a brief prelude of the digital treatment to come. Hilton and Phillips begin to introduce more digital processing over the course of the next three tracks. Sans Mouvement II, the second track, finds the drone of the guzheng placed a little further back in the mix—less like an instrument and more like a stormy ambience—while small digital clips and stutters begin to enter more fully into the forefront of the piece. The third and longest track, le gout de néant, presents a much more processed landscape. It begins with what sounds like a piano being tipped over and prodded, as the acoustic space is digitally prodded into short cusps of sound, before the guzheng enters and attempts to reinstate its place. In the following twenty minutes two modes contend for aural dominance, as the guzheng moves between recognizable acoustic instrument and digitally filtered and fragmented sound. The final track, Sans Mouvement III, serves as a meditative outro, as all the discord of the previous track gives way to a series of low sound-fields, bringing us to a restful, if dark, home.
Chris Kennedy is an independent filmmaker, film programmer and writer based out of Toronto. He has programmed for the Images Festival, the Pleasure Dome screening collective, the Free Screen at TIFF Bell Lightbox and he co-founded the Early Monthly Segments film salon. His short experimental films have screened at over one hundred film festivals. He holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. More information on his work is available at www.theworldviewed.com