Tom Hall - Fluere (CD + Download)

Released March 4th 2007

Reviews:

Though sourced from what would generally be considered field recordings, Tom Hall’s “Fluere” has a distinct air of composition about it; in essence, it strikes me as closer to musique concrete. The source in question is the Story Bridge in Brisbane, Australia and the sounds utilized have evidently been culled from a massive catalog compiled by Hall over the course of a year or so. Thus reconfigured, the disc sets up an interesting dichotomy for the listener. You can’t really hear it as a “field recording”; the artifice is too clear and there’s little real sense of natural flow and atmosphere. So you tend to neglect the origins of the sounds themselves, instead focusing on how they’re organized, sequentially, in opposition, etc. The instances where those two streams imperceptibly merge are where the real juice resides.

This placed me in something of a quandary when I found myself more interested in the resonances of a given sound or series of sounds than the manner in which they were arrayed on the track in question. The bridge, not surprisingly, is a trove of deep, cavernous tones, recoverable from contact mics placed at various points. The interactive vibrations caused by vehicular traffic echo deeply into the structure producing booming throbs and dull roars, augmented by dozens of other, less bass-oriented tones occupying hiss and click territory. You can easily imagine sidling up to a stanchion, laying your ear on the metal and luxuriating in the sonic bath. Hall collects these elements, chopping and dicing them into more clearly directional compositions, constructing various rhythmic patterns (though these tend not to stay in one groove overly long, a good thing), overlaying higher pitched washes and patterns, often lining the bottom with a selection from those hyper-deep pulses. For this listener, the results are more successful the more expansive the end product, the less hemmed in by rhythmic constraints, the more—too the extent I can determine this, which may be minimal—the original sounds are allowed to be themselves. This occurs most strongly on tracks like “Fluere through the Metal Hair”, where the huge rumbles seem to billow, cloudlike, into the atmosphere and, in a different sense, on the ensuing “3,227,416” where the compounded traffic sounds, from engine growls to bridge-segment tire clicks, coalesce into a an imposing, and not a little bit terrifying, mass. “Undulated Fluctus Wave” also creates a thick, sweeping wash of low scrapes and repetitive, metallic echoes that build into an impressive, almost monstrous vortex, the bridge assuming the guise of living, respiring behemoth. On pieces like this one, where Hall succeeds in concocting a visceral entity apart from the source, you really get the sense of the possibilities in this approach. I’ll be curious to see where he goes from here. In the meantime, fans of that nexus between natural (even if manmade) sounds and their deconstruction and reconstitution can find a good deal to chew on during “Fluere”.

Brian Olewnick, Begatellan

Tom Hall is an Australian artist and musician who uses a variety of sources to create vast ambient soundscapes that are similar to the works of S?bastien Roux and other like-minded contemporary minimalists. This album "Cross" is also his first for Shoeb Ahmad's hellosQuare Recordings. 

It offers a series of very concise vignettes ? all around 5 minutes at most ? which seem to follow a secret narrative path. On the first track, you can recognize the presence of physical instruments. There are some metallic scrapings which seem to have been extracted from a guitar or a dulcimer and have been processed to the point of delineating a more electronic "ambient" horizon. Nothing really new here? And as far as I'm concerned, Hall's approach doesn't strike me as being particularly original.

Still, it is when I read the titles of the 8 tracks contained on this cdr that Tom Hall's project began to make more sense to my ears. In fact, the titles read like some sort of fragmented haiku. Each of them thus seems to describe ? in an almost programmatic manner ? the actual movements of the music. 
Accordingly, the first track is called "Drawn from Depths" and it is exactly what you hear when you listen to the ways new forms actually appear through the manipulation of all the original sound sources mentioned above. 
"Towards Surfaces" makes ample use of isolated guitar notes, repeating them, sampling them, twisting them all around until a throbbing low-key sound pattern introduces more drama. Something is being created, but we don't really know what it is? 
"One Can See" gives more shape to the understated sense of narration suggested by track listing. It mainly evolves around some lonely guitar lines which gradually become subjected to various electronic treatments. There's even a brief sequence in which the guitar harmonics seem to have been enhanced so as to produce a halo of ambient noise. Although it is a very brief moment, it really made sense to me as I instantly connected it to the track's title.

The mood that can be found in "Many Reflections" is definitely more troubled which, again, could be linked to the title. As the more dissonant elements of the piece begin to recede in the background, a discreet melody played on the piano (in a very Eluvium kind of way) finally takes over and suggests other emotional paths before dissolving into more ambient bliss. 

Tom Hall uses his sounds as a palette that he can endlessly manipulate via his computer skills. Consequently, the melodies are often more felt than heard. Yet, they resurface here and there. "From Years" is yet another aptly-titled drone reverie as memories and faces constantly seem to glide upon the surface of this new sonic form. Yet, the careful use of a collage laptop technique in the last part of the track suggests a more chaotic side to this remembering of sorts ? an aspect which is more fully explored in "Gone By" which displays some definitely darker overtones. It is all very ambient still, but more spacey and full of sonic contrasts. 

"Leaving Intricate" finally seems to unravel a more melodic path as a toy piano and an electronic drone answer each other in the most delicate way. The presence of buzzes and other muffled rhythmic patterns adds new colours/ new poetic gestures to the piece. 

The last track which is entitled "Beauty" seems to sum up everything that we've been hearing so far. It first carves out a clearer melodic construct until the sounds become slightly darker in tone and textures. It may well be the densest track of the whole CD and thus concludes the album on a particularly disorientating note. 

By now, I'll let you re-construct the whole poem made by the track listing and let you appreciate its actual relevance. As I've already mentioned, I think it is a key for appreciating the music. This, plus the fact that you need to listen to the whole CD as if it was only one piece ? a mindset which will leave the listener with the task of connecting all the pieces and fragments together. 6/10

Francois Hubert - Foxy Digitalis