20 years ago, US sound artist Christopher McFall quietly emerged via a Spanish netlabel with his first release, A Starved-Strafe Lancing Machine, an album i wrote about in 2022. Throughout his career, McFall’s output has deeply and consistently impressed me, and his releases have featured in many of my Best of the Year lists: 2008, 2009, 2010 (both EPs and Albums), 2011 (Best EP of the Year), 2013 and 2024, the large gap there being due to McFall’s lengthy hiatus after 2013.
Despite these various mentions on 5:4 over the years, i’ve really not given his engrossing work the attention it deserves. That changes now; over the next few weeks i’ll be devoting this year’s Lent Series to an exploration of McFall’s output, primarily focusing on releases that, due to the inevitable vicissitudes of labels, have been unavailable for many years. This series has been put together in collaboration with McFall himself, who is poised to reissue these releases, which in some cases have never been available in lossless audio. i’ll be taking my usual chronological approach in this series, beginning with McFall’s second release, A Little Rouge, which originally came out in 2006 on the Laboratoire MODERNE line of Jos Smolders’ long defunct EarLabs netlabel.
There are many aspects of McFall’s work that i love, but if i had to pick just one, i think it would be his unique approach to chiaroscuro, embedding so many of his sound materials in a bedrock of rumble and judder. i can remember when first listening to his music in 2008 – The City of Almost was my first contact – that the black and white cover artwork seemed entirely apt for McFall’s nocturnal soundscapes. This is ‘greyscale’ music, lacking obvious signs of sonic colour, and also ‘umbral’ music, existing on a spectrum that includes white but is skewed heavily toward a myriad near-black hues. What makes it all the more tantalising is the obvious fact that field recordings are at the heart of the music, apparent in almost everything we hear, yet McFall obfuscates their origins, usually not seeking to be directly (or even implicitly) referential, at most vaguely suggestive. We are thus engaged on two levels: by the sonic materials themselves and the possibility of deciphering them, while our imagination constructs its own narrative in response.
The two parts of A Little Rouge explore this kind of soundworld in different ways. The opening, title track is a classic example of what i described above. Low rumble is the default position, around which we detect small signs of movement, a muffled lurch here, a surge there, plus small amounts of soft surface noise. There are some lovely moments when the bass moves, distinct from the rumble as a powerful deep throb. We get the simultaneous impression that the different elements we’re hearing are either connected together or related simply by proximity, as strata, one above the other. It’s mesmerising for the ear, pulled to the individual layers – a recurring noise pulse (that for a time makes the whole texture sound like it’s stuck in a loop), high scratchy sounds, Geiger counter-like pulsing chatter – and back to the whole sonic entity, semi-convinced that one layer is impacting against or affecting the progress of another. Certainly a climactic focal point around the golden section sounds like an instance of multi-layered coordination, but elsewhere it’s nothing like as certain. Regardless, ‘A Little Rouge’ is a spectacular demonstration of the understated way McFall makes disparate elements become fundamentally cohesive while keeping both their nature and their relationship almost entirely moot.
The second part, ‘Fate Map’, instantly sounds less natural, much more processed, with angular electronic protrusions from a sustained drone. There’s a harshness hitherto absent from the album, and a distinct sense that the music is moving forward, getting unsettlingly muscular. These twin strands of drone and detail gain a sequence of tiny pings, the start of a gradual increase in textural complexity that becomes gorgeously rich. Though it threatens to overwhelm, McFall holds it in check, continuing (but not receding) as an ongoing dronescape with a mix of high and more vague middle register elements. It unfolds according to an unhurried narrative, though it never sounds anything other than focused – this is not remotely passive music (let alone ambient). It fades back into mystery, continuing as shuffling sounds at a distance, swallowed up around halfway through by a new, intense drone that engulfs everything. McFall bravely allows things to effectively stall, before the stalemate leads into an almost industrial conclusion with more and more percussive clatter. Again held in check – an equilibrium with a delicate pitched central point – the piece fades away from high to low, leaving the final vestiges of rumble to dissipate like muffled aftershocks.
The life cycle of A Little Rouge has been unfortunate. Originally released in 2006 as tolerable quality (supposedly 175-225kbps VBR) MP3s, on the Laboratoire MODERNE line of Jos Smolders’ long defunct EarLabs netlabel. The MP3s were not encoded well, with audible compression artefacts rendering the already murky textures even more impenetrable, and making the listening experience rather tiring. The album appears to have been available for only two years, disappearing from the web some time in 2008. Then it popped up 13 years later on the Internet Archive courtesy of some no doubt well-intentioned bumbler who needlessly re-encoded the MP3s as 128kbps CBR, thereby obliterating the already blighted sound quality.
i’m delighted to say that today, almost two decades after it was first released, A Little Rouge is available again in lossless audio via Christopher McFall’s Bandcamp site. The clarity of the reissue, heard in full resolution for the first time, is absolutely superb, revealing extra brightness in McFall’s soundscapes, which sound more beautiful than ever before. They also reveal that ‘Fate Map’ has one of the loveliest spectrograms i’ve ever seen (see below – for authenticity presented in greyscale). Furthermore, McFall’s new artwork for A Little Rouge complements its umbral and ambiguous qualities superbly.
