objects
masks props by joel stern on naturestrip
Brisbane based but often found wandering throughout
Australia and regions far further out, Joel Stern, has been restlessly,
compulsively, devising, capturing, constructing this album on and off
over the past 6 years (2001-2008). Created from instrumental debris, snatches
of environmental sound (Ethiopia, India, Toowoomba, his lounge room)),
and a rather poetic sensitivity for lovely incoherence, Objects.Masks.Props,
is the clearest and most potent reflection yet of Joel's musical and artistic
approach - somewhere between music concrete, art brut, free noise, cinema,
abstraction, and the farmyard..
a psychotropic travelogue of an unmapped realm between Jon Hassell's
fourth world and Pierre Henry's laboratory throat singing bees rabid
dogs minimalist patterns looped chants a fevered dream a mournful lament
the hum and crackle of decaying beauty tickle the inner ear fragments
of
melody detuned strings sound swept through an open window seeds
passing one hand to the other an ebbing accordion
tapestry of the found and
created
a cinema for the third eye
(Leighton Craig - August 08)
fucking gorgeous man...like dropping e and laying
in the grass while friends and animals wander amongst musical flashes...insects
slowly filling the mind with secret tones while the persistent memories
of earth give solace amidst the dissolution...or something like that...
(Michael Donnelly - August 08)
It's much like a radio play--evoking places, situations and actions that
go beyond sound. i realize upon intentionally listening--headphones, no
visual inputs, home alone, etc.--that this record solicits my imagination
to get involved with it in very concrete ways....
the ruins left behind a carnival...poor children who never got in to the
tents to see the show are now scrambling in the debris (a discarded rainbow
wig--mounds of elephant feces--an accordion key) left behind in a great
field. and yes...beginning it all with a crackle!
(Loren Chasse August 08)
The voices of far and wide are carefully placed
in the music, music is played like it part of the field recordings, and
music that is perhaps played 'outside', all carefully constructed, selected
and edited to make this excellent release.
(Vital Weekly 648)
Like some Southeast Asian fever dream, Stern's constructions throb, mutate
and insinuate themselves under your skin. Wielding a range of sound sources
from rabid dogs to accordion to dirt, skirting the ground between noise
and melody, he comes up with a really fun recording and a couple of stellar
tracks ("Dead Lakes" and the closing "Fortitude End",
for me). Different from what I've heard from Stern before (which I've
generally liked a bunch) and very enjoyable
(Just
Outside)
Self invented narratives form almost instantly when
listening to ‘Panda Box’ or the aptly titled ‘Wake In
Fright’ – Stern’s use of curious sound effect-like elements
creating cues as to where the mind might leap next. Taking equally from
histories of musique concréte and field recordings as well as dabbing
in a casual stroke of improvisation to his auditory paintings, this record
is by far Stern’s most accomplished effort and opens the way for
a more measured and versatile range of audio to come
(Signal To Noise Magazine)
The emphasis on melodies, however fractured and disjointed, on Objects,
Masks, Props is additionally fascinating, with one able to imagine snatches
of an otherworldly radio transmission of Saharan bazaars, Daintree rainforests
and inner suburban jam sessions alike at various junctures. With a strong
grounding in the beauty of naturally occurring sounds and simple acoustic
instrumentation, Objects, Masks, Props could well be the future of pop
music in a post-apocalyptic, electricity starved world.
Joel Stern's CD is very accessible. My immediate reaction was to interpret, to make stories from these aural vignettes. They seemed like tiny movies to me . . . and this is what they look like:
The sound of someone standing on a guineapig, but I could be wrong. The little squeal of feedback near the end is great. Stringed instruments strummed in an almost rhythm, the birds are relentless and I think someone is poking a hankie down a pigeon's throat. Call the RSPCA. The rooster however, seems happy. Rainstick is cultural vandalism. I love the reedy harmonica cross rhythms, the backwards stringed thing is almost a voice and the frogs and crickets take us away. Someone eating the packaging from a 40" Sony Bravia and then polishing off a couple of expensive microphones as dessert. I love the low frequencies in this piece. I feel as though four people dressed up as bees and then crawled in to my chest as I was sleeping. Look, now they've crept up into my head , emptied two of the cupboards, let the bath overflow, tied saucepans to their legs and are re-enacting what they saw yesterday on Slapdown. A cougar is loose in the aviary. The rain beats down on the tin roof as the wolves close in. I don't care, I play my simularium and chant the words I've heard since I was a baby "nah nah nah nah nah nah nah". Release the mice, for soon the end will come and the colour of the end will be pale orange or possibly a light brown. In the forest, a woman with a violin bow in her throat talks to the birds, the birds. Jane Rutter is in a tree trying desperately to find 4RPH. She is distracted by the woman, finds it hard to concentrate, the words are familiar and yet not. She finds something eventually but it's simply annoying so she leaves it on, hoping that the violin lady will stop. It doesn't work. A man arrives with a snare drum in his nose and leaves with the violin woman. They will be happy. But not Jane. The microphone is tied to an animal in a folk club whilst tuning is underway. A box of crickets has been left under the third table on the left. The room is sad. Four people have received parking tickets. Only one will contest their legality. A passenger plane arrives to buy takeaway and is not served. Why?
I think you can see how
much I enjoyed this CD. I'm equally sure that your movies will look very
different.
(Media
Culture)
This is bizarre in every sense of the word. Naturestrip
is a label that has dedicated itself to propagating all sorts of
composition through field recording, with sound artists like Tarab and
Loren Chasse crafting impeccable scores directly from the earth, and rural
psychedelic practitioners like Leighton Craig and Eugene Carchesio crafting
skeletal song against an environmental backdrop.
Australian sound artist Joel Stern has taken his field recording tactics
into an unusual place of thickly collaged signifiers
with hints of song, rummagings for texture, and straight recordings from
out the in the field. It sort of comes across as a ramshackle
radio play, as if some genius lunatic outfit like the Starving Weirdos
were given permission to fuck around in the INA-GRM studios. Stern offers
up some improv clamor in the woods with sticks, twigs, and bird chorus
playing equal part in the noise with squeaking horns, concertina strum
and squabbling noises. He's also found scraping upon styrofoam, and steel
springs for an unnerving background of skincrawling textures that counterpoint
tension-loaded pops of long wire manipulation and the occasional heavenly
ring of chimed bells. Feral dogs bark and howl in the rain while Stern
overlays a simple melody line from a thumb piano coaxed into harmony with
a distant chanting of unknown origin. He's at his best when an unsettled
musicality seeps through the field recordings; and perhaps he saves his
best for last, with the plaintive strum across the guitar and harmonica
set against a distant wailing of children becoming a tragic end to this
Fellini-esque album.
Remarkable to say the least.
Aquarius
Records
It makes me feel like I'm dreaming in fragments with the window open.
A fascinating album.
Boa Melody
Bar
The Wire - December
2008
'Objects.masks.props.
" is a suite of studio
daydreams (2000-2007), a compulsive
wandering revealing a strong poetic sensibility, a re-enchantment of the
world via the musical composition of abstractions. Melancholy and sometimes
harsh, but most often tender.
Metamkine
"Objects.Masks.Props" is a collection
of lucidly confusing places from Joel Stern, purveyor of various audio/visual
underwater-improv delights including the beloved "Sunshine Has Blown"
release on MYMWLY as well as countless other collaborations and exercises
in processed technicolor. The clarity of composition in these affected
field-recording cut-ups is astonishing even as the sense of place they
contain is constantly erased under a barrage of electronic interference
and instrumental damage, leaving a bewildering trail of utterly gorgeous
elements interacting seemingly of their own accord.
Often a piece will enter with some bird calls, a barking dog or some other environmental touchstone and become ever more rotated by the skew of tonal appreciation, yet the layering doesn't wipe the original source - or if it does, literally, then the lovely attention to detail which pervades all eight, relatively short, tracks allows the mood set by the opening gambit to flourish and dance with the incoming sonic apparitions, they in turn looking as much "back" to the trail of bleached air and painted leaves as "forward" as a record ineluctably must. The record then, is on one level a quite beautiful experiment in 360º editing, as the temporal sense in these pieces is constantly swallowing its own movement, the juicy gulps of airborne feedback, melodica hum, mbira notes and concertina squeeze articulating the action with delicious acuity, playing with previous sounds and offering them up in a new light whilst moving by turns and loops into new territory.
The constant interaction between "found" and created sound sources is fertile ground for such a plot, and both are managed with precision and joy - what makes Stern's use of "environmental" effects so keenly collaborative with the "artificial" ones is that they work to gradually dispel the untenable notion that environment consists of such diametrics, each composition a process of re-imagining the natural to an aspect of worldly involvement. So that the equipment list can consist of "...musicboxes, accordion, bell, wires, bees, rusty gate, harmonica, rabid dog..." as any recorded sound at once becomes a separate entity from the environment it was extracted from and is yet embedded in the same continuum and is approached with the same measure of reality - practically, this means that the sound of bees, dogs and birds can and will interact with devices designed to make music in remarkably real ways, that properly and beautifully capture the total subjective experience of listening without shutting out environmental "interference"; in fact precisely without "capturing" sound but enabling it to form new languages from its own ways of working. And the electronic processes involved in the tracks as they shift and slip in playful asides is the perfect image of such a collaborating experience. The huff, buzz, glow, loop, crunch and whoop of the music then becomes inseparable from its ordering or coding into these effervescent nuggets, which might sound obviously like the results of any laptop-processed gumpf but is rarely accomplished with such attractive patience (the album was put together over 7 years recording bits and bobs in Stradbroke Island, Pushkar, Jaisalmer, Melbourne and Luang Prabang among other places).
And yes, some bits do sound like the best bits on "Sunshine Has Blown", bubbles of tone rising to the surface in an orchestra of flowering blub. One of those rare records that manages to be methodologically exciting and gorgeously enticing at the same time. Tuck in.
9/10 -- Joe Luna (14 January,
2009) Digitalis
Australian author Hugh Wilcken, enthusing about Joy Division in the latest (January 2009) issue of The Wire, writes about how strange it was for him "listening to Joy Division as a teenager in the sun-drenched, hedonistic Sydney of 1981."
Maybe it's a bit of a cliché, maybe it's just me, but "sun-drenched" is the kind of adjective that often springs to mind on listening to what comes my way from down under – from the gamelan clutter of the Pateras / Baxter / Brown trio to Jim Denley's environmental improv (Through Fire, Crevice + The Hidden Valley), from the rich hues of Oren Ambarchi to the garden intimacy of Carchesio and Craig's Leaves (also on Naturestrip).
And there's certainly a lot of sunshine and colour in Joel Stern's latest offering, made with "car radios, pipes, bulbul tarang, no input mixer, ukelele, pocket trumpet, doors, electronics, junk, concertina, rainstick, music boxes, accordion, bell, wires, bees, rusty gate, harmonica, rabid dogs (!), mbira, megaphone and bits and pieces." But these eight brief pieces, dating from between 2000 and 2007, weren't all recorded in Australia – among the many places Stern lists is Ipswich. Hardly my idea of sun-drenched, but never mind. Stern is clearly having so much fun sticking his mic into beehives it really doesn't matter. And I guess you could find a bee or two in Ipswich, if you looked hard enough.
My esteemed Editor Nate Dorward recently moaned about the overuse of "cinematic" as an adjective to describe much recent sound art, and I'm reminded of Michel Chion's observations on music as image in his recent interview here: "People tell me there are images in my music. They hear a dog barking, and say it's an image. To which I'd say, if a dog barking is an image, tell me what kind of dog it is. A big dog, or a poodle or what?" (At least Stern informs us that the canines whose mad yelps we hear on "Dead Lakes" are "rabid"..)
Whether you like the old Metamkine "cinema for the ear" line or not, there are enough recognisable natural sounds on offer here to conjure up some kind of picture in the mind's eye. This may not be "pure music" (whatever that is – even Chion doesn't believe in the concept), but it's certainly good music in my book – beautifully recorded, carefully sequenced and aurally immensely satisfying. Along with the abovementioned Leaves, it's my favourite outing on Naturestrip to date.
Dan Warburton - Paris Transatlantic
Drawn together between 2000-2007 the list of sound sources and instruments on Joel Stern’s Objects, Masks, Props reads like the contents of an old bric-a-brac shop: “car radios, pipes…no-input mixer, ukulele, pocket trumpet…electronics…rusty gate, harmonica, rabid dogs…" And like a good bric-a-brac shop, while the mass of stuff may not initially appear orderly and logical, each element feels well-pondered and lovingly handled, resulting in the album offering plenitude without clutter.
The CD consists of eight relatively short tracks (with the exception of Throat Priest) each of which run straight on to the next, not with delicate cross fades but sudden jump cuts. Each track works towards but never quite reaches its ending, shifting us to a different atmospheric place every four minutes. However the overarching world we are in remains the same with every piece underscored by birds, insects and lo-fi static.
Ironically, while Stern’s sound for the audiovisual duo Abject Leader (with Sally Golding) is often non-narrative, this collection of purely sound pieces suggest far more filmic forays. Hints are provided in the titles but, within the soundscapes themselves, mini-dramas unfold. For example on “Concertina for Henri Mouhot”, a mournful wheezy concertina, accompanied by a percussive rainmaker, increases in intensity until the piece is swirling with stumbling notes and electronic bleeping to create a kind of malarial delirium. (The French Naturalist Mouhot died of malaria in the Laotian town of Luang Prabang where Stern collected some of his material.)
“The Dead Lakes” is the most filmic in style where squawking birds, heavy rain and increasingly terrifying, howling dogs are joined by a malevolent chant and subtle melodic underpinning to suggest a horror epic yet to be made. “Pheromone Wings”, meanwhile, is perhaps the strongest example of Stern’s heightened use of field recordings, as the buzzing of bees is effected with reverb and matched with drawn out notes from reed instruments, and orchestral samples creating an agitated symphony.
“Panda Box” is the noisiest track on the CD as rooster crows are mixed with tedious childlike tinkering with the bulbul tarang [an Indian banjo played with a keyboard]. This turns into a controlled cacophony strangely moving towards cohesiveness with the use of a radio sweeping through static-filled channels.
“Throat Piece” is the most spacious track running to almost nine minutes. Sharp bird twitter is accompanied by a beautiful bubbling flutelike sound—perhaps an effected bird call, or is it an instrument? This is quite rudely interfered with by glitchy radio static, and the two textures continue in parallel for several minutes until a murky channel is settled on and we hear the distant strains of a prayer song. Eventually a sample is introduced in which words are clearly discernible—“I wish I had gone with Elsa”, adding a curious text-driven denouement. While perhaps a little looser than other tracks on the album, it clearly illustrates Stern’s associative approach—both textually and content wise—to his sound materials.
The first and last tracks on Objects, Masks, Props are the most melodically pre-occupied. In the first track, “Stradbroke Verse”, flute-like tunes drift in and out of focus like mist floating through and prettying up a landscape. In the final track “Fortitudes End”, the melancholic accordion and guitar drive the ‘song’ accompanied by strident cicadas, wailing women and general gritty atmos, each element separate yet complimentary.
Objects, Masks, Props is perhaps most interesting because rather than the field recordings grounding us in the ‘real world’, serving as markers of concrete space, Stern’s manipulations and combinations create a kind of lucid-dreaming—a not unpleasant state to dwell in for the 40 minutes of this CD.
Gail Priest - Earbash Realtime Arts
Joel Stern’s recent
solo album Objects, Masks, Props (Naturestrip) is one of the more interesting
and accomplished works of sound art you will hear. Recorded between 2001
and 2008 with raw material gathered from Ethiopia to Toowoomba it features
field recordings of everything from bees within a bee hive to angry sounding
dogs and insistent rain, yet there are also these thin wisps of melody
that peek through occasionally and are quite beguiling. Despite the length
of time in the creation it doesn’t feel composed, the feverish layers
of sound slowly twisting and contorting in and out of earshot evoking
an exotic fourth world sonic experience. The depth of his layering is
astounding, taking you right inside a world that has never existed, yet
so too is his editing which in the main is invisible, like he is attempting
to craft an experiential sonic world for the listener, his edits replicating
the subtle movement of the head in order to change sonic perspective.
It’s a unique experience.....
Bob
Baker Fish - Fragmented Frequencies
Joel Stern toys with the indistinctness
of sounds, forging enchanted similarities from clearly delineated distinctions,
painting glosses one on another, and opening up intervals of spacing in
which differences arise anew. This isn't to say there's something particularly
arbitrary or fickle about the proceedings. As has been known for some
time, there has always been a certain kinship between madness and poetry;
and, though the tracks here contain elements of both, they always take
their lodgings in the latter.
Stern works with an 'other language', one just beneath the surface, where unshakable dualities reside. To keep up and reflect them, he moves with haste and levity. On "Concertina For Henri Mouhot" his configurations throw up shadowy angles across the stereo spectrum as the piece shudders to its riotous conclusion. Further pieces don't tend to let up; they propel the listener around at varying speeds and altitudes while still locking them in orbit around the gravitational pull of the rasping drones and spectral melodies. "Fortitudes End" is a fine example of this, it's nest of garbled voices gobble at alien frequencies as a sad harmonium melody plays from within the thicket.
In fact, Stern traverses a number of styles at a stroke: musique concrete, electronica, psychadelia, and noise are all found in ample measure, spread out, juxtaposed, broken down and rebuilt into a complex and mobile whole. The work thus avoids any semblance of kitsch or pastiche. Objects, Masks, Props, some six years in the making, is nothing short of a strategically mischievous deployment of the right wrong sounds.