Pas Musique/Ben Link Collins/Shaun Sandor: Of Silence (Alrealon Musique/Blondena Music/Silent Media, 2013)
December 22, 2013 at 11:26 pm | Posted in Reviews | 2 Comments
Pas Musique/Ben Link Collins/Shaun Sandor: Of Silence
Exploring roles of silence in music, we have three artists taking specific concepts of silence, creating pieces based on these concepts, and then passing them to the other artists to re-interpret them with their own concepts. Pas Musique work with amplified silence, so their own work sounds like a room humming, with an oddly rhythmic quality. Ben Link Collins works with studio silence, so you hear the sounds of a silent studio, starting with what starts like a bird chirping. This sound does return a few times, sometimes to abruptly end some other slowly drifting sounds. But it all definitely sounds like a studio representation of silence in nature. Shaun Sandor works with inert instruments in an active room, so in his piece, you hear contact mics recording inactive musical instruments in a studio. Beneath the hiss, there are some sounds, so it sounds like he’s creating guitar drones elsewhere in the room, but it’s quiet because he’s not actually recording them. So when all these concepts combine, you have quiet drones filtered through hiss and inertia (or so it would seem). Nothing on the disc actually consists of pure silence, although I guess the whole point of John Cage’s “4’33″” is that there is no absolute silence, there’s always sounds surrounding us, and silence in music just gives us a chance to reflect on them. Which makes it all the more interesting that this CD that I received is a bit scratched up, and when I ripped MP3s of the disc, the skips appeared in the MP3s as well, so I feel like that adds an extra dimension to this whole concept. Anyway, I’m most familiar with Pas Musique of the artists on here (
Abandoned Bird Egg is definitely one of my favorite discs of the year), and their contributions seem to be the least silent, and have more going on and more ebb and flow, so I tend to enjoy those pieces more.
The Answer Is In The Beat 
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