20 years ago, during an especially fervent time of musical discoveries, i encountered a musical project, and creative identity, that beguiled me in an entirely unique way. i’ve often wondered who’s behind the nom de guerre At Jennie Richie – Discogs (un)helpfully describes them as “the culmination of Happiness and Forever, a duo – sometimes trio, occasional foursome, sometimes five and dime…” – but at the same time the not-knowing only feeds into the appeal of their decidedly rarefied music. At the time of that first encounter, i’d become quite immersed in the work of Matthew Waldron’s irr. app. (ext.) project, and it was via his music that i initially came across At Jennie Richie. As luck would have it, i discovered them at the very start of their output, with a cassette released in 2006 titled Six.
Six is from one perspective a noise album, though of an extremely focused, filtered, almost minimalist kind. Furthermore, the two sides of the cassette explore very different notions of noise.
Side A is headed ‘Black Meta Demo Two’, and comprises three parts. The outer two function as brief introduction and coda. ‘Cold Earth’ consists of around 90 seconds of low amorphous contours, a black curtain-raiser conveying a sense already of something ‘causing’ the shapes in the rumble.
Then comes the main body (cadaver?) of Side A, ‘Night (Burial) Terrors’, where those hints are greatly extended. The track seems to present activity, something that we can imagine is tangible, but which has been enormously low-pass filtered. Though still present, it speaks as a sequence of obscure, intermittent, deep shifting sound masses. They’re demonstrative, to the extent that, at times, they sound almost like a halting ‘voice’ uttering sentences that have been entirely obliterated into judder and throb. The title rings / rumbles true: whatever the source once was has been confined in extremis. Parentheses as coffin, sound as interment. Our imaginary vantage point lies deep underground, noises reverberating down to us through layer upon layer of compressed earth. The pervading sense as it continues that this is utmost alienating, distanced music, is entirely correct, entirely the point.
Side B has ‘Black Meta Demo Four’, comprising a single 16-minute track titled ‘Shi’ (the title being the Japanese word for both four – this is track 4 – and death). This seems to present the opposite of ‘Night (Burial) Terrors’. Noise now as erasure, except of course that would manifest as silence, so it’s actually more like replacement: as if almost everything that once was had been overwritten with low frequency noise. Imperfectly, though, as it seems more akin to a palimpsest, coloured by a very soft repetitive noise patina suggesting the presence of a needle on an archaic playing surface.
We’re left groping in this abject darkness, our ears latching onto anything that might constitute a trace of something corporeal. Yet what sounds do appear do not approach tangibility, manifesting instead as momentary artefacts and vague low movement amid the ongoing hiss and crackle. At no point is it possible to resolve, or even infer, their nature; they appear and vanish spontaneously, sonic disjecta membra that barely project identity, let alone anything else. Yet every time i listen to ‘Shi’ i find it mesmerising, even electrifying; where ‘Night (Burial) Terrors’ has a kind of blank, passive immersion, ‘Shi’ is utterly active, heightening our listening in the attempt to parse anything that might once have been substance. Lost in these sub-hauntological vestiges, the best we can do is guesswork and pareidolia, our imaginations flailing at the concept of what this is and what it might once have been.
Originally released in 2006 on the superbly eclectic Enterruption label as the first part of their ‘Hermetic Archival Series’, Six was available in a limited edition of just 50 cassettes. While some of the AJR back catalogue has subsequently been made available on Bandcamp, Six never has been. There’s a copy on YouTube already, but it’s sound quality is poor, so until it becomes available in some form, i’ve uploaded my own pristine cassette rip. Go deep.
