i often find myself thinking of the word ‘concrete’ when listening to Christopher McFall’s music. It’s because of the way that word’s meanings have a contradictory presence: many of the sounds McFall uses feel solid, firm; yet the soundworlds he creates tend toward vague, allusive and abstract environments. Concrete, yet not concrete.
One of the best examples of this duality comes in his 2010 album The Body As I Left It. Even before engaging with the sound, one’s struck by the vivid descriptiveness of that title, which contrasts with the complete lack of titles given to its seven parts. i’m going to tentatively suggest that listening to them in any order is as valid as the order on the album. They come across as variations on a theme, distinct but related expressions of the same essential utterance (that same perspective could be said to apply to McFall’s wider output too). Together, they accumulate and consolidate, but their purpose isn’t about articulating a longer-term linear narrative.
In terms of palette, The Body As I Left It occupies another region in McFall’s uniquely umbral soundworld. However, in some respects it’s both a more focused and more forbidding region, in terms of what it suggests and the way the sounds speak. Part I is a familiar form of overture. It undergoes a fascinating shape-shift, with something noisy slowly and subtly pushing through a low drone with vinyl crackle. As the elements merge they come to resemble a blazing fire, which vanishes into a series of loud tolling notes. Yet this almost seems like a red herring in retrospect. Part II picks up the tollings but, together with a persistent knocking sound object, here they assume an atmosphere of stifling claustrophobia. It eases for a time, soft noise appearing like light rain after a storm, but a new form of blurred tolling emerges, as if evolving directly from what went before, intensely throbbing back to a place of stifling closeness.
These opening tracks suggest a tilting between two states, and that continues in part III, where a powerful but otherwise innocuous drone with light clatter transforms into something deeply unsettling: a strange regular surging, pitched but surrounded on all sides by rumble, noise, muffled sounds. It’s as if we were descending into some unfathomable depth, with the blank ambiance at the track’s end suggesting we’ve arrived. All of which imbues what follows with an even more enveloping tone of abyssal profundity.
As such, there’s something almost absurd about the visage of an old record playing out at such depths, hinting at where the album began, but soon losing clarity and becoming a vague loop of gravelly, pattering noise. However, there are times when McFall’s slow sonic evolutions work like illusions, and here that ostensible loss of clarity turns out to be the opposite, actually revealing a new pulse that had hitherto been masked within. The illusion continues as our stereo sense is widened – overall, much more clarity rather than less – though as if to keep that in check McFall gradually obliterates everything. Heavily muffled impacts soon become the only remotely discernible reference, and before long it’s as if all we’re hearing – everywhere – is the reverberation of things we can’t possible identify. And yet, somehow an oscillating major third shines into this darkness, joined by an oscillating semitone, the two eventually radiating so strongly that the total obfuscation is wiped away, making everything seem tangible again. This, the longest part of The Body As I Left It, with its interplay of lucidity and obscurity, is superbly effective, one of McFall’s most telling compositions.
Another major third oscillates in part V, serving as another clear point of reference in a context of bass notes too low to grasp, sounding less like pitches than a dense fug. It’s a catalyst of sorts, the possible trigger for a looping muffled piano phrase. We’re lost again in part VI, rendered infinitesimal within a serious sense of enormity all around. Something looms from below, leading to another sequence of tolling notes, again impossibly deep. Light scratches etch its surface, and there’s a brief, unexpected addition of something akin to muted water, though it’s quickly filtered out of existence.
By now – both within this album and this Lent Series – we should be intimately familiar with McFall’s sound palette, and yet the bassy, noisy element that hoves into view at the start of part VII seems strange, even rather alien despite what’s gone before it. It crossfades into something similarly inscrutable, snatches of possible breath amid a collection of indefinable sounds. A clunking clock takes over, finally bringing some clarity, but it’s swiftly replaced with something creaky before descending back into looping mufflement.
That curiously indifferent conclusion is one of the reasons i suggested earlier that The Body As I Left It – and perhaps some other McFall releases – might not need to be listened to in track order. Not only is there not a clear start and end to the album as a whole, there’s also the commonality to each track i mentioned before, as well as a circularity of sorts: we keep finding ourselves in similar, tangential, or parallel places. That’s true of McFall’s work generally, though it’s interesting to note how much more challenging the soundworld is here. i’ve previously characterised it as umbral, but the level of darkness and obfuscation is far more pronounced here, at times leading to a powerful perception of choking claustrophobia – all the more so when listening through headphones. This is some of McFall’s most intense work.
The Body As I Left It was originally released in May 2010 on the Sourdine label – the same as The City of Almost – in a limited edition of 500 CDs. It’s never been reissued (although, amazingly, a handful of copies – to be precise, three – of that original release are still available from the ever-dependable Drone Records), until today, when McFall has re-released the album via his Bandcamp site.
Original liner notes
This collection of works was assembled in 2009 and was composed using piano, a broken phonograph player, field recordings and sampled material. I think that this release embodies a certain diversity in terms of content because at the time I was recording these works I was experimenting with several different approaches to developing new compositions involving the use of a more melodic approach to things. Once the release was completed, I had several thoughts in refrence to a title and the title ‘The Body As I Left It’ seemed the most appropriate to me given the circumstances that had occurred during the time of it’s creation.
—Christopher McFall
