Intercepted From Air

Meteorological Avant-Transmissions, Intercepted From Air
Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory; Luc Ferrari's Les Anecdotiques

by Don Allred
August 2nd, 2004 3:30 PM Issue 31

Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory
Staubgold
Luc Ferrari
Les Anecdotiques
Sub Rosa


Avantricity's freebirds (Matmos, Autechre, Fennesz, many more) ride the
soundtrack of David Toop's new book, Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory.
Right channel clusters, left one cloisters, then they're passing through
each other. In time as well as space, when (b) connects with (a) and (x). Disc
2 is mostly ghostly instruments; Disc 1 is more: for inst., the singing
fry and fray of Alvin Lucier's "Sferics." ("Natural radio-frequency emissions
in the ionosphere, radiated from nearby or distant lightning," Toop notes.)
One Weatherbird's ambushed by street sounds, but they're countered by
visionary description; violence gets safely aestheticized. The artist as museum
guard? Where is she later, when I hear a shovel blade in oily gravel, too near a
hypnotic/hypnotized-sounding muezzin?

On Luc Ferrari's Les Anecdotiques, voices are talking, frequently in female
and French, beware. (American's also spoken, in Chicago and "dancehall Texas.")
Often near bird-bordered beaches, while engines drive up and away.
Eventually, doors slam and then beat on—doors of a sea tunnel, turns out. Anecdotal,
yas: L.A. swings, as Ferrari intends, in and out of meaning, like a pendulum do.
Go listen to your pillow and be glaaad.

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