Cracking The Surface

Description

A rare showcase for the late and great instrument builder and musician, Tom Nunn's, skatchbox and skatchplatter - which appear alongside prepared and regular pianos, a buchla modular synthesiser and live sampling. Wholly organic and initially acoustic, skatch sounds are imbued with life and character but are virtually impossible to place. The Skatchbox is an empty computer keyboard box which has objects such as combs, washers, sandpaper, toothpicks and metal wires glued to its surface, while the Skatchplatter, similarly adorned, is laid out on a circular piece of cardboard mounted on a turntable. Skatch instruments are played with modified combs and are amplified using simple piezos. While that might sound a bit 'so what' in print, believe me, the sonic palette created is staggeringly wide and invokes voices, instruments and electronic sounds, while remaining thoroughly enigmatic and impossible to visualise. The recordings here - impressively, made in real time - work at a level of complexity and mutability that almost defies decipherment; so that, as well as being (for some, not all) a source of constant surprise and pleasure, this record also functions as a kind of brain-exercise, since things change so quickly, but cross-relate on several parallel levels simultaneously, that, if you focus closely, you can find extraordinary details and micro-structures at every turn. At the same time, at the macro scale of normal attention, it all makes perfect sense - although the speed of mutation and variation is boggling. There's real structural depth in these recordings; no repetition, no settling into a groove and nothing obvious, but everything is in constant motion and there's never any fat, or pedaling or waiting for the next idea. Track 3 is truly impressive. All in all we think an exemplary release, not least because these sounds are organic and mechanical and are played interactively by real people in real time, with a high level of musical sensitivity.