Four Feels For Fire was Christopher McFall‘s first physical release, put out on CD by renowned Belgian label Entr’acte in 2007. At 50 minutes’ duration, it was also his longest work so far, structured in five sections, the first four titled after the points of the compass, with a closing Epilogue. i mentioned previously how one of the defining features of McFall’s work is its submergence in low register rumble, as if emerging (barely) from obsidian shadow. He has often struck me as a kind of ‘anti-Parmegiani’ in the way he deliberately keeps his sounds from becoming referential. They’re barely allusive, and while i’m sure McFall does sometimes want to evoke specifics in his soundworlds, i’m also sure his intentions are as much to do with triggering our imagination and letting it attempt to resolve what our ears are hearing. His original liner notes for Four Feels for Fire (see below) do mention specifics – “Kansas City’s dilapidated buildings and eroded city streets” and “the seemingly endless heat, grit and turbulence that is typical of summer in the mid-western United States” – as well as mentioning the origins of his field recordings. And yet, even knowing this info in advance, it’s extraordinary the extent to which the music evades its own points of origin, turning abstract.
However, that implied heat is audibly present right at the start of ‘North’, the opening fade-in transporting us into the heart of something quietly blazing, at first uncannily central in the stereo field, soon expanding outward. It brings to mind A Little Rouge in the way it falls back into rumble with muffled and muted impact sounds. We’re left with a possibility of train sounds, made tantalising in the way McFall suggests not so much specific objects as more generalised actions: moving, rising, scraping, striking. Also like A Little Rouge is the stratified sound structure, with discrete elements blurring the distinction between being connected or merely adjacent. The smaller-scale sounds, in particular, both the darkly muffled ones and those with light, tickling clarity, usually come across as independent of whatever else is happening, materialising and vanishing like will-o’-the-wisps.
‘South’ switches to a more scratchy sound palette, like something extant half-sounding through dirt and delapidation. It leads us into a soundworld that, due to its muffled nature, could be friction or rapid-fire impacts. The creaks and bangs lead to a new stratification: drone below, noise in the middle, light details dancing on the surface. Another characteristic the music has hitherto shared with A Little Rouge (and it’s true of much of McFall’s output) is its slow-moving manner, with ideas emerging, receding, crossfading, in a ballet of sonic movement that’s unpredictable but smooth and graceful. It’s an interesting counterpoint to the obviously heavily artificial nature of the music, that it should be presented in such an organic, evolutionary way, as if McFall had simply captured in real time something abstract and alien, but real. ‘South’ ends up in a remarkable, full sequence where the strata come close to feeling interconnected, brought together through a mixture of timbral similarities and sustained pitches, until everything subsides and sags.
‘East’, the central panel, is by far the longest part of Four Feels for Fire, lasting over 23 minutes. It takes us back to something akin to the opening of ‘North’, suggesting both fire and wind, in what sounds like a low-grade source, its blank noise pock-marked with scratches and small reverberant impacts. They sound heavily processed, but around four minutes in they yield to what seem more like traces of human movement, tactile but intangible, remote and unidentifiable. It’s a fascinating sequence where a great deal is happening but none of it can be readily parsed. Unexpectedly, following another slow shift into strata, McFall abruptly cancels the fading low noise, leaving us in a granular space with what sounds like a chorus of tiny flapping wings. There are distinct evocations of trains at times through what follows, but they’re channelled into more large-scale abstraction. The passage around 12 minutes in, coming in waves, is especially striking – what are we hearing? – as is what follows around five minutes later, in the second half, where tiny traces of something detailed (extant music?) stay just beyond our reach, swallowed up in rumble, shuffling scrapes and assorted bands of pitch and noise. It’s a testament to McFall’s skill in managing these soundscapes that the balance always feels right, never giving too much away but never becoming frustrating or seeming arbitrary. Perhaps something about the kinetics of the sounds implies a process and / or a direction.
Penultimate track ‘West’ is another bifurcated piece, light motes on the surface of rumble, becoming more potent here due to their polarisation. It’s a claustrophobic space, illuminated but tightly enclosed, with a pitched element occasionally low in the mix. We remain here for a little over five minutes, pulling back (or reducing down) to an even more muted and less tangible space in the closing minute, where amid dull thuds something akin to a lifeform briefly calls. It happens just once, but it’s one of the most arresting and unforgettable moments on the entire album.
For the ‘Epilogue’ McFall ups the ante. In a similar way to how ‘Fate Map’ changes tone on A Little Rouge, here too there’s a more overt electronic patina to the sound palette. It’s all very obviously, and heavily, processed, but more than that the gradual shifts and fades are gone. In their place are jump cuts and non sequiturs; we’ve only just started to get to know what’s before our ears only to find it replaced with something disjunct. The tactile / intangible duality is emphasised, and made highly dramatic. Textures reduce, seemingly exposing their inner details, only to become opaque, suddenly flowering, before cancelling out into a kind of blank periodicity. It all sounds extremely hands-on, McFall at his most spontaneous, which only makes the conclusion more fittingly mistifying, recoiling from all the concrete qualities of friction that pervade this track, into a place of little more than vague sniffs of sound.
Originally released in 2007 as a limited edition of 300 CDs, Entr’acte subsequently made Four Feels for Fire available as a download in late 2020, until the label was shut down a couple of years later. Christopher McFall has reissued the album today, available from his Bandcamp site.
Original liner notes
I began working as a composer around ten years ago, with my primary focus on the experimental aspects of music involving piano and computer-based techniques. After several years of working in this fashion, my interests began to shift away from orthodox approaches to instrumentation and musical arrangements, and move toward the distillation of minimal sound compositions from field recordings and audio tape experiments. Throughout the last six years I have lived and worked in the blighted industrial warehouse districts of Kansas City, Missouri, USA. I’m certain that this aspect of my life has inspired my need to operate in a reductionist manner as an artist.
Kansas City’s dilapidated buildings and eroded city streets are presented as a barren reminder of lost functionality, and my experience with this declining environment seems to have evoked a great deal of artistic inspiration. The field recordings used for many of my works were taken directly from the area where I live — from the train yards to the vacant amber-lit streets at night.
Four Feels for Fire was composed throughout the summer of 2006. The field recordings that served as a primer for these works were drawn, primarily, from analogue tape manipulations, whereby the tape was physically extracted from its housing mechanism, treated and then altered and layered using a computer. This series of works represents the seemingly endless heat, grit and turbulence that is typical of summer in the mid-western United States.
Four Feels for Fire: heat approaching from all directions— north, south, east and west.
Epilogue and the second half of East were also recorded during the summer of 2006. These works were remastered in 2007 and included in a self-released volume called 1000x. Given that these pieces were derived from many of the sounds used to make the initial selection for Four Feels for Fire, I’ve decided that it is necessary to include them with this release.
—Christopher McFall
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