Review of:
Sterile
Garden - 'Fragmented Warehouse'
Released on 23 april 2019
by No Rent Records (Philadelphia,
USA) as 'NRR105'.
C28 Cassettetape:
Side A: 14:09
Side B: 13:12
Digital version:
'Fragmented Warehouse' is a
new exciting adventure of Sterile Garden - the 53rd release of this project.
It is a logical and
unpredictical work within the body of work that has his own logic - an unique
voice - urgent - convincing - intense - complex - elusive - cinematic - overwhelming
- charged - and of a true Subversive Beauty.
The soundworld of Sterile
Garden offers a practical tool to alter states of mind. Listening to Sterile
Garden enables the listener to break with any form of pattern \ repetition with
regard to the relation between man and environment - and enables the listener
to look again in a fresh and open way to the world - at the same time it's an
initiation into another world, which is in this case and in fact the same - it's
stripping the senses and mind of superficial judgements and definititions.
It is s a kind of Ursonate
- but it is not the human voice but the voice of the raw materials of the world
- the screaming soul of industrial and urban landscapes seen through the dirty
and magical filter that is Sterile Garden.
It's bringing the concrete
forms and shapes of the world back to an elemental state in order to construct
a new intens language out of it, that lays bare unforseen \ hidden\ potential truths
and experiences.
The idea of architecture
deconstructed and rearrangend - the brutality of it's presence - and it's secrets
suddenly reveiled - the fresh wounds.
The idea of music itself
deconstructed and rearrangend.
So, Sterile Garden music
and anti-music at the same time.
Imagine, is my advice, a
presentation of the idea of a large building, for instance as a movie, or better
with the use of 12 overheadprojectors - a presentation that is an ultra fast
sequence show all the stages and aspects of the building: various forms of destruction
of the building, the cleaning of it - also in reverse, the undisciplined scaffolding
starting their own life and movements, all the people and visitors as ghosts - their
activities captured in a lost trance, its denial, the barly audible breaths and
the furious storms, all the views and misunderstandings of the atmosheres
inside the rooms, broken televisons and radios that transmit new possibilites with
their decaying signals, the drawings of architects cut in pieces and
re-arranged, all water taps at the same time and unstoppable, the construction
of it, the endless rhythms of night and day viewed as stoboscopic fever, the
swallowed situations, the silence of the suffering furniture, hysterical
timelapses, its absence, dancing layered x-ray photos, poisoned archives and weathered
carpets, sudden memories, drunken visionary incidents, the life before its
presence, its ruins, the naked electricity, the wallpaper that evokes dreams of
the tired workers, all the knowledge and the strange moments.
It is that experience
Sterile Garden has to offer - the simultaneity of Richard Huelsenbeck, the Delirium
of Rimbaud - Yes! it is a "long, prodigious, and rational disorganization
of all the senses" - it transforms the listener into a Visionary.
If art is capable to hold
up a mirror to the world, the listener in this case will cut his skin on mirror
shards – and in the shards a primal sun and screaming city lights are reflected
sharply and violent. This blood will fertilize the soil of the beautiful
wasteland that lays in the shadow of false order and illusion of functionality.
Yes, a theatre of cruel
sounds - but I would not call it noise, because although it has harsh elements,
it is too multidimensional to be placed inside the limited field of 'noise'. Sterile
Garden describes its work as a Musique Concrète project - and besides the
relation with that tradition, I feel many connections can be made: early Étant
Donnés (Marc and Eric Hurtado); Dada visual collage; futurists bruitism and
Intonarumori; the abandoned factory recordings and use of metal debris by the
people of the Industrial Music scene; Psychogeography and Guy Debord and 'The
Society of the Spectacle'; the cut-up practises of William Burroughs and Brion
Gysin.
Yes, it is the montage
that is so important in the work of Sterile Garden, the aprubt changes that are
so wonderfull and effective. Complete worlds evoked in a small moments, but
then suddenly our dream-skin against silent textures and raw surfaces, but then
suddenly a percussive pattern recorded in locations in different continents,
but then suddenly a cut-up version of the text above on the presentation of the
idea of a large building, but then suddenly a cluster of derailed reel-to-reel tapes, but then suddenly a small
orchestra of surprised voices of undefined elements caught in a secret intimate
encounter. Over
the years the fragments became richer in number and quality. The vocabulary
keeps growing. The elusiveness is articulated very precise. Each time, the
listener can make a different montage of the totality of them and comprehend
something unpredictable and unique, that only exists because of Sterile Garden.
So, yes it is highly
recommended.
Secret Chants
23 april 2019
Some notes\Something to
read:
'Ursonate': Kurt
Schwitters, 1932
Richard Huelsenbeck: 'En
Avant Dada': A History of Dadaism (I920).'
Arthur Rimbaud: 'Lettre du
Voyant' 1871
Arthur Rimbaud: 'A Season
in Hell', 1873
