One of the defining features of Christopher McFall‘s sound art is the ambiguity with which his source materials are handled. There’s at most a liminality to it – enough clarity (or ostensible clarity) to suggest something tangible – yet more often we’re left to fend for ourselves in worlds of mere shape and shadow. Among the most elusive is This Heat Holds Snow, released in 2008 on the Mystery Sea label, which ran from 2001 to 2015. In many ways that was a good home for this kind of music, being as it was (according to their surprisingly still available website) a label focusing on “works where artists are invited to derive their inspiration from … open suggestive ferments / words, as well as their own experience”, intended to evoke “the primordial element shrouded in its unspeakableness, the permanent fascination for the archetypal liquid state…”.
“Suggestive”, “shrouded”, these are ideal words for McFall’s music, and indeed the first of This Heat Holds Snow‘s five untitled tracks opens with obscure allusions to movement, some semi-regular, with strands of noise around. The familiar crackle, present in so much of his work, materialises on top – with reverb, highlighting its separateness from everything else – plus some bands of pitch, and shortly after we can even make out traces of voices in the hubbub. There’s something quintessentially McFallian about this: sounds that seem so tangible and immediate yet which remain at a distance from us. It’s impossible not to think of a phrase from McFall’s programme notes for this album (see below), which could serve as a descriptor for his entire oeuvre, “possibilities of detailed night”. The second half of the opening track fades in as a mass texture of muffled pitches, with a faint tapping stream of sound like data dancing across the surface (almost like a reconfigured repeat of the first half). However, it ends up in a place of real weight, partly implied, in a series of slower impacts; they’re constrained due to how muffled they are, but their power is all too clear.
McFall’s use of rumble often conveys a sense of forward movement, as it does through the otherwise blank start to part 2. But this is gone in under 90 seconds, replaced with something even less discernible, a strange looping crunch with a rapid chittering pulse, and something akin to slowed-down vocal notes, which slowly gain presence. There’s something dogged about all this, caught between motion and immobility, persistence and enervation. It passes through a fascinating passage of light, wobbly bass and faint noise as if we were descending deep inside something immense. It’s a palpable yet nebulous sequence, in which the amount of accumulation slowly becomes considerable, eventually sounding fast-moving and substantial.
Having vanished back into a weirdly trapped, muffled song, part 3 unfolds with a single buzzy pitch lurching out from indistinct noise, as if some hugely detailed original source had been reduced or filtered into a narrow channel. For the first time on This Heat Holds Snow there’s a clear sense of multiple layers and elements moving independently, creating a very broad perspective. Also for the first time we detect something of the titular heat; having passed through a light passage (~2:30) where there’s a paradoxical sense of both rushing and hovering, we arrive around a minute later on a seemingly white-hot surface where everything blazes, gently but with massive intensity. It feels like the speakers should spontaneously start to melt, yet McFall slowly transforms this into a milder heat, with distant drones and effervescent bubbling crackle suggesting the fizz of a cool drink on a warm day while planes fly overhead.
That moment of imaginary reverie is gone, instantly, in part 4. Looping impacts, deep rumble, vague pitch movement: we’re back within those “possibilities of detailed night” again, straining even to hear details let alone resolve them. Two minutes in there’s a possibility of extremely muffled singing, but it’s the only locus of tangibility, swallowed up in a delicate but impenetrable fug. i always find these passages all the more vivid for their apparent lack of focus. They’re like ‘in between’ soundspaces, not in the sense that they simply act as connective tissue between more tangible material (though they sometimes do), but as episodes where the elusivity reaches an extreme, causing the ear and brain to work overtime in a dual attempt to navigate and glean (or imagine) whatever they can from the grey expanse. Minutes pass – never for a moment remotely static – until a muted chord hovers before us, and a metallic ringing element fades in, like high-speed data being transmitted. In such a context as this, its clarity is overwhelming, all the more so as strong impacts strike from behind / beneath / beyond. The conclusion of part 4 is typically unpredictable, shape-shifting sideways into a band of turbulence with something ticking alongside it, before coalescing into a sense of multiple speeds at once, though the nature of both the movement and the thing moving remain ambiguous.
The short, final fifth part maintains this ambiguity, occupying another ‘in between’ where – another McFall trait – noise, pitch and rhythm all become blurred and inseparable. Even when ripples disrupt and break up the surface, halfway through, what emerges is a portrait of obfuscation. Maybe, here at the end, there’s a hint of the titular snow, sounds wafting sluggishly as if caught in a frigid, semi-frozen state.
Originally released on CD in a limited edition of just 100 copies by Mystery Sea, This Heat Holds Snow has been reissued today, available from Christopher McFall’s Bandcamp.
Original programme notes
I had placed myself in a rather not so unique position during the time in which I was composing these works. I’d been in similar circumstances before, however I’d long forgotten what it had felt like to be there… to have established yet an another alignment; a unity of two parts that had yielded an outcome that was nothing short of inharmonious. It’s interesting how the fever and turbulence of one’s surroundings can, at times, result in the most calmed and contained of workings. This is the place from which these works were conceived, as they were forged by storm and stress. I would sit never too alone in front of my computer by night and compose while my thoughts would slip ever so slightly into possibilities of detailed night, a place away from the fury of days into a place in which these works were realized, far from heat, but somewhere colder; somewhere bathed in wonderful oceans of ice. All that surrounded me seemed disrupted and volatile; however, I came to find, in fact, that this heat holds snow.
—Christopher McFall
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