It was with no small excitement that i heard a few weeks ago that US sound artist Christopher McFall was bringing out a new album. Not only is McFall one of the most captivating artists working with field recordings that i’ve ever encountered, but it’s also been no fewer than seven years since he last put out something new. His primary mode of expression tends to be in deep, dark realms where reality is transformed into shades of monochrome, in the process highlighting certain elements in the same way that black and white film reinforces surface detail, while also defocusing other aspects by rendering them in varying forms of noir-ish shadow. As such the role, and nature, of chiaroscuro in McFall’s work has always been paramount.
His latest album, I Throw The Switch On The Midnight Snake, finds him turning to sounds from US railroads, specifically those of East and West Bottoms, in Kansas City, Missouri. McFall describes how “[t]hese particular locations are unique because some of the trains … make temporary stops to change conductors and/or conduct maintenance operations. Others, however, pass by uninterrupted and continue down the rails at full-speed. In this instance, the velocity of each train is notably distinct along with the character of sounds that accompany it…”. It’s not for nothing that the title of the album contains the word “midnight”; heard through McFall’s unique filter, the sounds from Missouri are transformed into a soundworld etched in brightest silver and deepest black.
One of the things i love most about McFall’s work – and i vividly remember it was one of the first things that drew me to his work in the first place (way back in 2008, when his album The City Of Almost was released) – is its clear artificiality. That might sound like a strange kind of compliment, but many sound artists working with field recordings like to keep themselves out of the picture, so to speak, presenting their work as if it were some convoluted quasi-natural thing, seamless and pseudo-organic. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course (Natasha Barrett’s hyperreal soundscapes are superbly effective and immersive), but it’s also nice sometimes to hear something that’s the clear product of an artist contemplating their materials and audibly working with them, juxtaposing, filtering, layering, in a way that’s immediate and tactile.
McFall’s work always sounds focused, but that’s especially true of the five untitled parts of I Throw The Switch On The Midnight Snake. The unity comes in part from the fact that his sound palette is deliberately limited, such that the range of sounds, timbres and gestures becomes increasingly familiar as the album progresses, despite there being marked differences between the parts. It’s extended further by a clearly stratified approach to sound, whereby McFall essentially deconstructs the sonic elements and then reconstructs them such that their complexities remain, though now in a new multi-layered form. This creates a beautiful tension in part 1, where it feels active yet at the same time gentle, even relaxed (a tension that will be greatly expanded in the final part). A soft drone runs through the mix of pitch and noise, but it’s a different mid-register drone, materialising innocuously later from a small-scale surge, that ultimately dominates.
Part 3, the only part of the album to assert a more ambient sensibility. A hovering pitch cloud acts as a backdrop for vague noises and scratchy sounds, all held in a rotating kind of stasis. The stratification is especially clear here, to the extent that one can almost imagine McFall setting up his selection of sound objects and then easing them in and out of the mix. As such, this nicely undercuts the apparent stasis, as the music is never actually static. The early clarity is soon lost, via rumble, in textural obscurity, and when a sense of stasis returns, it’s very different from before.
Parts 2 and 4 are even more engrossing. It’s in part 2 that the scratchy, granular texture first makes an appearance, heard in the context of clear, regular sounds of wheel rotation, which instantly convey a palpable sense of power. It’s hypnotic as it cycles round, periodically embellished with gentle electronic bleeps, and while the layering is again abundantly clear, the layers sound interconnected rather than separate, heard as discrete aspects of a single totality. Proof of that unity comes when one of the layers, the heavy rotation, drops out, and it’s surprising how disorienting things seem in the wake of its disappearance. Now we’re just drifting in nebulous space, the tactility of the sounds militated against by the disconnect from anything sonically solid. It’s only when a deep juddering rumble fades in, bringing with it a faint reprise of the rotations, that we feel grounded again, leading to a new kind of hypnosis in the lower registers. McFall fills out the texture significantly in what follows, but the noisy nature of the sounds makes them elusive, and again we’re drifting, rootless. It makes one reappraise the percussive sounds from earlier, and realise they perhaps provided more to cling onto than was apparent. This aspect of the album, the way McFall’s treatment causes one to retrospectively rethink both the intrinsic nature of the sound elements and, more importantly, their new nature when made to interact, is especially valuable, and makes relistening all the more necessary and rewarding.
Part 4 is, for me, the highlight. Coming at this point in the album, a little under halfway through its total (37-minute) duration, it’s a significant departure from what’s gone before. Lasting eight minutes, it’s both more substantial than the 3- or 5-minute preceding parts and also, in its latter stages, a lot more demonstrative. This fact is interesting, as it highlights the fact that, despite McFall’s clear compositional involvement throughout I Throw The Switch On The Midnight Snake, it’s still possible for the resulting soundscapes to project a certain degree of passivity, due to the subtlety of how they’re constructed. From the outset things are different from what we’ve become accustomed to: birdsong and vague clatter before we fly into a filtered noise tunnel, soft swishes passing across our ears. But on several occasions it’s as if an invisible creative force is actively changing its mind, switching attention from one thing to another. Not jump cuts exactly, but nonetheless distinct shifts in sonic attention. Stability comes in the form of a lovely polarised texture, delicate and restrained, into which McFall occasionally reintroduces the wheel rotations from part 2, and a muffled iteration of the granular sounds. High tones protrude from this, and the entire atmosphere is by now caught between real-world evocation and imaginative fantasy. The most demonstrative action so far comes in a series of deep bass swells that can be heard either as neutral, a quasi-natural occurrence in this multi-faceted soundworld, or possibly catalytic, altering the aural make-up of the soundworld to the extent that it erases essentially all pitched and percussive content, leading to a myseriously nebulous end.
The extensive 13-minute final part serves as an extension, a development and a synthesis of sorts. It’s immediately apparent that pitch is going to play a different role here. In the opening minutes, amidst seemingly powerful but quiet rumblenoise, metallic pitches emerge prominently overhead, stray notes that eventually form a vaporous rudimentary melody (falling by a semitone and a tritone). They’re lost as McFall increases the density of the hectic underlying texture, though without making it significantly louder, creating an excitingly tense restrained energy. Piercing tones, heard earlier on the album, return sporadically now, whistling over a reprise of the scratchy textures from previous parts, now allowed to be heard with greater clarity. Throughout all of this that same balance of considerable weight matched by considerable restraint is maintained, until overtly hydraulic sounds (a new element, hitherto unheard) appear alongside train clatter in the middle distance. Thereafter, the album concludes draped in McFall’s familiar dark shadow. Everything sounds muffled, with something akin to a horn articulating a falling fifth, again and again, caught in a perpetual final cadence. It doesn’t get the final word though; McFall refocuses one last time, and over low rumble we glimpse again that rudimentary melody, fading away into the night.
Released by Unfathomless at the end of July, I Throw The Switch On The Midnight Snake is available on limited edition, numbered CD (170 copies) and download.
