When exploring This Heat Holds Snow, i mentioned how Christopher McFall’s music features passages i call ‘in between’, states where things are more than usually elusive and / or blurred. The conclusion of that album took the three discrete elements in McFall’s work – pitch, rhythm and noise – and blurred them into a new kind of obfuscation. To an extent that’s taken considerably further on his 2010 album An Eris 23, though less as dense, impenetrable fugs than in slowly flexing formations where sound objects are modulated and refiltered, in the process revealing not only more than we realised was there, but that what we perceived as one element is, in fact, another.
That being said, the most immediate thing to grab our attention in An Eris 23 is the fact that everything we might have expected – rumble, darkness, unclarity – is absent, replaced at the start of part I with a looping four-bar phrase, something extant, something tangible. This opener is a paradigm – a statement of intent, almost – of what’s to follow. A second, scratchy element is present on top of this loop, though the belief it’s emanating from the loop’s vinyl surface is disabused as the music fades, leaving the scratches behind.
The disconnect is more in Part II, the floating loop a high stratum above low muffled noise. The noise swells, pushing aside (erasing?) all trace of pitch, and we’re left with more vinyl crackle. It becomes the pulse for a new loop, with a rising scale phrase, itself taken over by milder noise before ending up coalescing around a juddery central pitch, a bright buzz burning rhythmically (suggesting movement) and with something harmonic just about clear through the buzz.
i’ve spoken about pitch and noise as different, even opposing, elements there, but as i indicated at the start, the way McFall employs them is more subtle, often suggesting evolution rather than simple crossfading of separate materials. The sounds morph, inner details are extruded, other aspects are damped down, such that, as usual with his music, it’s difficult to define not merely the origin of a sound but also its limits and constitution. Contrasting this is part III, a simple repeating piano phrase, though even here we become aware it’s not just a simple loop, with the upper notes changing as it continues.
From the simplest to the most complex: part IV of An Eris 23 is an expansive essay in similar forms of shape-shifting. A halting, impacting sound intrudes on a subdued hissy loop, over time sounding less and less like something percussive but more like a radically pitch-shifted musical idea, relocated into bass darkness. The following cheerful plinking piano loop, similar to part III, reveals higher notes than are originally apparent, later undermined (and replaced) by low, resonant and obviously distinct tones that again skirt the line between rhythm and pitch. The central episode takes this to a gentle extreme, a new musical loop sounding in the midst of hiss and buzzy bass that’s either part of or separate from it. The conclusion plays out in an apocalyptic soundscape, a vestige of piano from the end of the world, whereupon McFall reduces everything down to a stuck, static loop amid muffled noise and residual impacts, like a heavily erased hauntological artefact.
The final two parts explore different kinds of ambiguity. Part V features a strange squall of stuff high above a low amorphous cloud. The squall vanishes leaving the cloud hovering, like something brilliantly bright viewed through a dark filter. What follows is mesmerising: a sputtering noisy loop (reminiscent of part IV), its chord marred by bassy blurts while the background noise makes one wonder just how passive it is. The clearer loop that emerges is either a clearer manifestation finally making itself heard – having been refiltered – or something new grafted on. The final part seems to be going the other way, with a bold, stark, repeating falling phrase, though it’s as easily subsumed by noise as everything else. McFall seems to be ushering us into one of his claustrophobic sound envelopes, heavily filtered and constricted, but it’s as if air were being pumped into the space, making everything bright and clear, and giving the impression (often heard in McFall’s work) of moving at speed. We arrive somewhere enigmatic, a seemingly submerged piano answered by weirdly glowering swells and an epilogue where the loop speaks like an ancient sonic ghost, caked in vinyl detritus.
An Eris 23 is markedly different from the albums featured previously in this Lent Series. It’s still an obvious product of Christopher McFall’s uniquely monochromatic vision, but there’s a different, beautiful kind of liminality heard here, where elements have not only their nature, and their source, but their very definition challenged. Repeated listenings are never the same; the sense we make of it one time is different the next. Yet it’s also, in some respects, simpler. The loops of piano material – upbeat, forlorn, wistful, inscrutable – are much more tangible reference points than McFall usually provides. Their context is as complex as ever, but they’re a rare, albeit temporary locus of clarity in a world where nothing is certain.
An Eris 23 was originally released in October 2010 on the shortlived SiRiDisc label, as a limited edition CDr. There are no traces whatsoever of the original website and no information about how many copies were made; not many, i’m guessing. Having been unavailable for nearly a decade-and-a-half, Christopher McFall has re-released the album today, via his Bandcamp site.
Original liner notes
When I began composing ‘An Eris 23’ I was in the process of trying to find a theme. This isn’t exactly out of the ordinary, as I’m always looking for new themes and not exactly in the manner that would facilitate a story. For me it represents more of a combination of raw emotions, environments and visualizations, the likes of which need not culminate to portray a specified series of events. Effectively, it’s an attempt to embrace the essence that I’ve assigned to the work during the time that I’m engaged in the process of making it. ‘An Eris 23’: there’s something about the way it slips off of my tongue, it’s the verbal phrasing and the themes that come to mind concerning the tragic elegance of a Greek goddess born to wield tremendous discord and strife. This mental imagery really seemed to drive the music that I was composing at the time. ‘An Eris 23’ was composed using piano, sampled material from a broken phonograph and field recordings captured both digitally and on treated tape. For me, there’s a undeniable sense of beauty, grandiosity and dark cinema to be found within these recordings.
—Christopher McFall
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