Seth Cooke - Double B  (2015-2018) (Reading Group)

Seth Cooke has created many fantastic sounds over the past few years (see especially his 'Triangular Trade' on suppedaneum) and here's yet another set. Here, we're dealing with field recordings but not only have they been sonically manipulated (as Cooke puts it, "Five tracks of one-take pseudo-performative no-input field recording/field recording, upon which compression was piled until the structure broke under the weight."), but they carry referential weight as well. Cooke alludes to bullet holes in a sculpture, MP Jo Cox' stabbing and plans for attempts on the lives of Jeremy Corbyn and Sadiq Khan.

Even if, as I am, you're at some remove from these events, they and things of that nature are well worth keeping in mind as you listen to these five rather harrowing tracks. The sound field is abrasive, loud, skittering and clanging. Electronic scrapes collide with metallic bangs on 'Sun Tunnel (Solar Totem #1', the piece involving the sculpture (this one, I take it:)

This segues to 'The Centre Cannot Hold'--quieter but just as agitated, even more so--windy, buffeted electronics mingling with rapid scrapes and rasps, then dark, deep metallic strikes. On purely aural terms, just a spectacular excursion. In an odd way, 'The Crossing (Syria Notes #1)' ratchets up the unease, with a repeated (backward, I think) sequence of about seven grainy sounds in swift succession, over and over, with scrabbling beneath--I found myself, especially given the title, thinking of war plane fire over a city, its inhabitants scurrying for shelter. Its conclusion is even darker, summoning images of soldiers sifting through ruins in the aftermath. 'It Does Not Further One to Go Anywhere' is brief but cavernous and full of foreboding. The final work, 'Return of the Jihadi/No Platform', the longest piece here, may also be the subtlest. While the sounds are as acidic as ever, their melding is more generous, more integrated, multiple levels weaving and intersecting, maintaining very separate lines on the one hand, forming complex "balls" of multi-element noise on the other. There's a slow but steady surge, chillingly enhanced by a siren-like grind--think buzzsaw slicing metal--interrupted by blasts of...radio static? sharp fragments of other recordings?...I have no idea. And then simply crumbles.

Great work. Listen.

Reading Group