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 60s
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 Dockstaders
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
wasnt 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.