Tom Hall - Past Present, Below (Download)

From Thoughts Distraught by Tom Hall

It has been in excess of 2 years since Tom Hall's last full length solo release. Since that release Hall has crossed the globe a number times playing in excess of 250 live shows, experimenting and honing many of his techniques for producing live sound and image performances. However, during this time Hall has been working away on one record, 'Past Present, Below', whether it's been sitting on planes 35,000 feet above the earth or hidden away in a warehouse in San Francisco, this album is the 'record' of 2 years of experimentation, honing and life experiences drawn from almost every area Hall has visited, played, tasted or experienced. 

Past Present, Below, marks the refinement and accumulation of a set of studio practices Hall was fighting to become comfortable with some 2 years ago. Utilising a variety of techniques to bring together a vast array of instrumentation that includes drums, guitar, piano, organ, virbraphone, chinese gongs and harmonia in combination with field recordings stemming from vast regions as foreign as the most south western tip of Australia to Kyoto temples, German rivers and Tasmanian forests. Hall ties these varied sources together with a unique blend of studio practices ranging from max/msp processing to guitar fx pedals and organic processing which sees Hall replaying/recording pre-constructed compositions back in to environments where they originated. His use of software often involves using parameters or organic field recordings for the basis of any synthesis, with the direction or manipulation often controlled by aspects of the area from which the recordings were derived. 

It is Hall's passion for the 'mundane' and the 'everyday' that inspires him to work with sound as a means to both document his surrounds but also as a way to create larger representations of the vast regions he has covered in the past years. These larger environments become what he likes to describe as 'hybrid environments', places and spaces that meet sonically and musically in Hall's compositions but could never in 'real-life' collide.  

This album due to it's accumulative nature and time spent bringing it together is Hall's most developed work to date.

Credits:

released 01 April 2010 
Thanks to M&D, J, The G's, Lawrence English, Scott Arford and Christopher Willits 

Mastered by Lawrence English @ 158, Brisbane, Australia 

For Rhani.

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Reviews

"No matter what Hall’s music evokes for individual listeners though, it is deeply involving on a very personal level..." 

"Much like the photographs that accompany this release, the music evokes the transitions from day to night in places where nature and the constructed environment intersect..." MESS+NOISE

"Another excellent ambient release in a year already chock full of tasty drone treats, Australian sound manipulator Tom Hall returns from a two-year hiatus with a release whose carefully constructed sound benefits from the long gestation period the music went through during its lengthy creative process.  “Past, Present, Below” is rich with varying textural combinations, from buzzy synths to mellow long tones and crackling static atop whispy synths.  And with everything going on sonically, Hall manages to work well within a genre notorious for boring listeners by not resorting to long-winded moments of stasis.  The record is anything but short on ideas, even though sometimes those ideas come and go so quickly you might miss them altogether.  The entirety of the album is rife with smart use of stereo space as sounds glide around the audio field with a slippery, soothing ease and structurally, the pieces succeed as well, Hall working in a way that brings pop sensibilities to the ambient world, extending ideas as old as Eno’s “Another Green World” into a modern arena.  “In Void We Explore” finds Hall at his best in this regard, as the middle section opens a curtain into a glorious and hopelessly full moment of chorus with alternating chords and gentle melodic motifs that pulse like flooding rays of sunlight on an awe-inspiringly beautiful morning.

The title “Past, Present, Below” has me giving Hall something of a double-take, though…after all, it seems like most ambient music of this sort shoots for the outer reaches and beyond, and many of Hall’s more full moments have this kind of lofty feel.  But Hall still feels grounded for the most part, incorporating elements only to process them to pieces and rebuild them in his basement of a sonic laboratory.  For as many acoustic instruments that went into the recording, the album masks most of the organic qualities that went into the samples.  The press release sites the use of drums, guitar, piano, organ, vibraphone, gongs and harmonium, but almost none of these instruments are recognizable as themselves, which is almost a shame.  The best ambient music organicizes electronics, making the inert vibrant and natural.  Hall’s work has somewhat of an opposite objective, limiting or marginalizing these instruments’ acoustic properties with FX pedals and processors.  The results make for an interesting listen but ultimately fail to fulfill the potential computer-studio music has been proven to achieve so many times, especially this year (see: Kyle Bobby Dunn).  The breath of life doesn’t quite fill this record’s lungs, but you just know Hall’s got the potential to draw a tear and tap into that deep canyon of human emotion if he wants too.  Let’s just hope it doesn’t take another two years to hear him take another crack at it."  FOXY DIGITALIS 

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