Natural History by Fergus Kelly
Fergus Kelly is one of those mavericks of sound that will both never cease to amaze you with how much you can get out of different materials that have different acoustic and percussive qualities as well as the sensitivity and a well-rounded taste in terms of post-processing.
The list of used materials is quite elaborate:
Sources:
Future Leakage - Saw blades, whirled cable, whirled horn, telephone bells.
Ornamental Stagnation – Manhole cover, steel conduit, steel cage, whirled cable, brass discs, spinning tops, bowed telephone bells, wildlife recordings (Iceland), dragged table, steamroller, wire fence (contact mic rec), waste water treatment plant recording.
Malign Alignment – Glass bottles, bounced metals, dragged chair, whirled cable, building site recordings.
Lingering Indigo – Saw blades, telephone bells, large wooden lath, dragged chair, dragged spring, timpani mallets on inflated plastic, bounced metals.
District Encircled – Large steel plate, barrier stand bases, dragged chair, whirled horn, passing plane and St. Anne's church bell, Limehouse, London, starlings and magpies in back garden, large wall-mounted radiator (Collins Barracks, Dublin), bowed & struck metals.
Dreadnought – Dragged table, bowed metals, Chinese cymbals, barrier stand bases, wood-on-wood friction, fireworks, whirled cable, whirled horn.
Necrotic Narcotic – Glass bottles, large & small steel plates, dragged chair, pigeons.
Widescreen – Dragged table, steel gate, passing plane, large steel tube, Dortmund church bells, Manchester tram, Madrid sheep bells, bowed car springs, dragged chairs, rain on metal, Antibes jetty underside, steel bell (Collins Barracks, Dublin).
Blemished Emblem– Metals, large wall mounted radiator (Collins Barracks, Dublin), dragged chair, steel fence.
Elliptic – Struck metal fence, barrier stand bases, rubber mallets on steel fence, rain.
But leaving aside all those details what we are getting here as a listener is an epic narrative where you travel the urban environment in a psychogeographical way, exploring everything that comes along with the craftsman musician who has not only experimented the variety of tones and multitude of percussive possibilities. He has gone through them very carefully and has appreciated, studied every single bit of those to create a novella of urban exploration with added value of field recordings which blend extremely well with all the sounds.
Natural history is both illustrative and acts as a quality of its own - a tale of debris, astonishment and horror. The undertones of a post-industrial survey across the places which are usually not seen as something relevant.
The source he is feeding his ideas from seems like an inexhaustible well and I would love to see how it will unfold in the future.
https://roomtemperature.bandcamp.com/album/natural-history
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