After the unexpected tangibility of An Eris 23, explored last time, Christopher McFall‘s 2012 album Epilog (Recombinant) isn’t just a return to his more familiar umbral soundworld, but to a degree that is way more than usually abstract. It takes as its starting point the materials he used when creating Four Feels For Fire (also explored previously), “listening to the material from a different perspective in the sense that my intent had shifted from the part of an engaged listener to that of an active participant”. This is a crucial shift, as where that album does indeed come across as a series of sound sculptures that we experience externally, throughout Epilog (Recombinant) there’s the constant impression that we now inhabit them, experiencing them entirely from within.
The opening part (‘Track 1’) plunges us back into an archetypal world of muffled but reverberant impacts and distant but omnipresent noise. It’s like being in a vast subterranean chamber with a bag over our head. After a couple of minutes there are traces of something at the periphery, but they’re as vague and inarticulate as anything else. These traces don’t so much get closer as brighten, their veiling filter being gradually removed. In the process they meld with everything else, ending up like discrete components of a huge, hellish machine, surrounding us on all sides with the bangs, clunks and purrs of its infernal mechanism. Within which we begin to move at speed, being rushed through the bowels of the machine, into even less fathomable depths.
It soon becomes harder to resolve the perspective: are we still travelling? moving slower? or are we stationary and surrounded by what sounds like an impossible torrent of hard rock scudding past? No answers; McFall simply allows it to continue, a regular accent (the only regular thing perceptible) smacking our temples from the left, while a gentle but abrasive bath unceasingly washes over us. It becomes a roar, hissing steam, but this too is allowed to continue, and for a time we become more like an observer, still trapped within, but able for a time simply to try to take it in.
Soon enough, at the start of the second part (disarmingly called ‘Track 3’; perhaps not a reference to musical tracks…?), we’re on the move again – or, here too, is it moving around us? Sounds swish past, seemingly striking us, and the speed seems to increase. Yet the perspective wraps round on itself, and there’s a parallel impression of immobility, trapped in some viscous liquid, bubbling, gurgling, boiling. Sonic definition, of a sort, only comes in the final 90 seconds or so, but even here there’s the dual impression of either us in clattering motion or back in the heart of the machine.
The ‘Epilogue’ of Four Feels For Fire demonstrated a significant step toward artificiality, the sounds now heavily processed, the joins between materials rough. Here, the closing ‘Epilog’ goes the other way, moving even more intensely into that ongoing impression of interiority and movement. Can we go any deeper? A dense rushing torrent with a lighter stream running through the top – incredibly real and vivid – escorts us to something akin to a blazing fire. Yet McFall causes the sounds to transcend reality (actual or imagined), transforming into a complex collection of clunks, as if the fire had transmogrified into physical form yet kept blazing. We’re subsumed within its corona, detail now lost in the unceasing roar.
It fades back but instantly returns as a new but just as intensely hot sonic object – a strong, clear connection to Four Feels For Fire – with light details discernible across its scalding surface. Again, McFall (always patient with his materials) allows this to play out for a long time, never remotely static, until it recedes, clarifies, polarises, in the process being struck by hard, muffled impacts, all the while as if the great machine were winding down, heavily filtered. The conclusion ostensibly lets air in, but we’re seemingly moving through a wind tunnel – further in or out? – with occasional squeals emanating from … wheels? metal? us? Fittingly, unsurprisingly, nothing is resolved or clarified, we don’t finally emerge from darker to lighter shadow. Abstract noise envelops us, and the music evaporates.
Epilog (Recombinant) was originally released in December 2012 by the long-lived and highly prolific Spanish label CONV, as a limited edition of just 50 CDrs. It’s been unavailable ever since (it was never uploaded to the label’s Internet Archive repository, which is just as well considering the sound quality of those uploads is abysmal), until today, when McFall has re-released the album on his Bandcamp.
Original liner notes
I began composing the initial framework for ‘Epilog (recombinant)’ in 2011 after revisiting old recordings that I had arranged previously for the release ‘Four Feels for Fire’ on Entr’acte in 2007.
In retrospect, the source materials used for the construction of ‘Four Feels for Fire’ have been a subject of ongoing interest for me over the past five years. In the summer of 2011 I began listening to the material from a different perspective in the sense that my intent had shifted from the part of an engaged listener to that of an active participant. At that point I began using the old source recordings to generate new material and combined these recordings with new field recordings on hydrolyzed tape to generate a recombinant series of works. The recordings that comprise ‘Epilog (recombinant)’ demonstrate a quickened sense of pacing that is structrually reinforced through the use of evolving textual loops.
—Christopher McFall
