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Pond

by Tod Dockstader and David Lee Myers
ReR Megacorp, Thornton Heath, 2004
audio cd, ReR TDDM1 LC-02677, UPC# 752725019620

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

It takes some time before the secrets of this cd are revealed unless of course one reads the liner notes first. But with nothing but the title as a guide, one wonders whether this is purely electronically generated sound imitating life or vice versa. After a while, one realises that the hisses, rhythms and barks are just a little bit too lifelike to be artificial and the curious atmosphere a little too objective, almost expressionless to be a product of the imagination. If I had known Tod Dockstader, I might not have had a doubt about what was happening here, but I confess I had to look him up. http://dockstader.info/index.php was a good starting point, and reading the accompanying notes was helpful too of course.

It so happens that Dockstader (born 1932) is a pioneer in electronic music and musique concrete whose works from the 60’s like ‘Quatermass’ and ‘Apocalypse’ have been recently rediscovered. Trained as a painter and filmmaker, he moved to Hollywood and produced sound for films, later working on educational video projects. Being a self-taught sound producer he fell out of funding and resources to continue making his music and he disappeared from the recording stage.

David Lee Myers on the other hand, made his name in the 1980s under the name Arcane Device. His tools were feedback, synthesizers and computers rather than Dockstader’s recordings and overheated taperecorders but the younger man managed to convince his friend to try them. And Dockstader seems to have been a quick study. He soon "realized that many of the old principles — slowing, speeding, pitch-change, reversal — were the same — but with much more control and better sound. And no tape hiss. Because it was faster and I could keep my belief in what I was doing, more fun."

The two of them started gathering frog and toad calls, recording around ponds late into the night and took that material into the studio where it underwent all kinds of transformation imaginable without ever losing a trace of its origin. What the artists did with their source material wasn’t haphazard though. Being professional "listeners", they wanted to come up with a final result that could attract and keep the lay listeners attention. So they augmented and interpreted the sounds they had heard and now used to recreate the environment of a pond, as if they projected their internal perception back over the water and among the reeds. Art and life blended into a new, richer acoustic experience.

 

 




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