i wrote previously about Christopher McFall‘s tendency to construct his work via smooth fades and transitions, rather than abrupt changes. That’s overwhelmingly the case, perhaps more than anywhere else, in his 2008 album Sensuality May Be Found At The Mouth Of A Snake. Though released as one 31-minute track, the piece is in three (or, depending on your perspective, four) parts, though they form a single continuity. McFall’s titles are always interesting, and the suggestions of desire, indulgence and danger here are highly evocative. There’s often an unsettling foundation in his music (due to its inclination toward low register darkness), but i can’t help wondering whether the suggestion of sensuality makes its presence felt in the extremely delicate handling of sound demonstrated throughout this piece, especially in its first two sections.
At the start there’s the suggestion of heavily filtered extant music, heard through hiss and distortion, with throbbing from below. But also, less than a minute in, there’s the implied presence of a person, the possible instigator of a series of metallic impacts. This, combined with rippling movements of the rumble, gives the music a muscular, palpable impression; this is sound we can practically feel. Soft noise is the backdrop for this, but it becomes more and more apparent, replacing the rumble, in the process moving from passive to active, revealing a distinct texture with extra-faint crackle. It becomes a cross between a wind tunnel and a waterfall, the torrent of noise – with a clear pitch resonating at its core – developing almost buzzing bass notes below. These seem catalytic, triggering the start of a slow fade-out. Despite the robust qualities of these materials, there’s a sense in this opening part that it’s all about things vanishing rather than being present. Either way, the gentleness of their overlapping is striking, perhaps suggesting a tactile pleasure on McFall’s part, handling these sounds.
The second part (7:03) places us within a juddering industrial environment, pummelling the eardrums. A gentle mid-register noise element materialises like a growing pulse, triggering the rumble to vanish, and making it clearer that this element is actually pitched, recalling the strange, possibly extant stuff we heard at the start, reduced here to an obfuscated loop. It’s soon overwhelmed, in a fascinating new texture where a huge band of noise is embellished with elusive, tiny, tickling sounds on its surface. This is unusual in McFall’s music, but we soon feel as if we’re moving along at speed, the combination of abstract (even archetypal) sounds here nonetheless conveying the impression of rapid movement. At first we’re in its midst, but McFall somehow extracts us, as if we were hearing it from outside.
Throughout these first 13 minutes, though the intensity is often strong, its actual loudness is relatively quiet (mostly below -6dB). That all changes in what follows, yet what’s most striking about the start of the next section (13:20) is the way McFall uses not rumble but abyssal bass pitches (F, Gb, Ab), almost too deep to be perceived, that cycle round to form a kind of bottomless pit. Imperceptibly, McFall tilts things upward, taking us into gentler but no less hard-to-discern climes, where soft pitches ping against vague scratching shapes. Whereupon we’re overwhelmed by a new strain of rumble (few sound artists have as many shades of black in their palette as McFall), thick and intense though surprisingly soft in the bass, with light seemingly pulsing at the top and a jet of wind blowing through the centre. Unlike some of McFall’s earlier work, this doesn’t sound stratified, but rather distinct parts of the same, large sonic object. The next wave has an almost animalistic aspect in the unsettling way something makes angular movements in the foreground, balanced by static noise behind. As happened at the start, that passive noise again assumes importance, replacing everything with gentle upper and powerful lower layers – definitely stratified now – that in due course yield to a mysterious sequence of low tolling tones.
The music falls to almost nothing, leading (24:02) into what could be regarded as a fourth, final section. This too is characterised by prominent pitch elements, here derived from those tolling tones that evolve into buzzbass draped in a new hue of soft, half-crackling noise. Something akin to a train rolls past while unconnected tiny droplets strike the foreground. It seems surprising that this sounds so restrained, but it’s merely an upbeat before crossfading into a busy texture laden with multifaceted stuff, activity all over the place, scratching and rippling, bass booming below, noise bands somewhat further away. It’s a wonderful sequence, continuing the constant push-pull of allusions – such demonstrative music – yet always kept at an abstract distance, focusing on shapes and forms rather than sources and objects.
Sensuality May Be Found At The Mouth Of A Snake was originally released in 2008 by one of the more consistently interesting netlabels, HOMOPHONI, in both FLAC and MP3 formats. The label effectively shut down in 2013 (a couple of postscript releases in 2017 nothwithstanding), with its website becoming defunct during the following year. In 2016, as was the case with A Little Rouge, someone uploaded a mediocre-quality MP3 and a truly execrable-quality OGG to the Internet Archive in 2016 which, tragically, has been the only source of this album for nearly a decade. However, as of today McFall has reissued the album, available in lossless audio direct from his Bandcamp site.
