Eloine: Green Stump/Short Community/Sagebrush Deimos

While it's unlikely Vivian Stanshall ever met Bryan Day, or heard his work as Eloine, Mr. Stanshall nevertheless provided an apt enough description: "Changing yet changeless as canal water..."

These three handmade releases contain uniformly remarkable work, the covers of which might make Motherwell shed a tear, and music of which might make Cage crack that smile of his. All the pieces manage to move along and stand still just enough for the listener to consider whether or not time is actually passing, or whether it is instead suspended in a grainy and crystal clear, formicated soundstage. Drawing together a seemingly vast number of sources, the pieces are generally formless and completely preoccupied with sound. Sometimes it is the sound of small things, like a button, a Jew's Harp or a Thumb Piano or the glissando of a sliding whistle; others a found object struck by another found object, all toybox free of clockwork and alarming in their specific presence. In some cases, like the suite-ishness of green stump, slow halos of grit accrete or entropically overcome varied disjunctive systems of chance, staccato interactions. short community offers a more legato solidity, with air. Other pieces incorporate traditional instruments played non-traditionally as a part of an ensemble determined simply by the fact that a sound may originate when some thing or other is stroked, plucked or struck. In every case, the niceties of Music are set aside, intimating that "Eloine" may or may not derive from "eloin", to operate outside the law, or at least in this case, outside the rules.

An alternative to alternative musics, Eloine resides as part of the artist colonies of work available through publiceyesore, digitalis industries or stentorian tapes, fitting if nothing else the outlier sound artist category perfectly. Cage once said that if an idea seemed weak across just a few minutes, one should repeat it even longer and notice that it will inevitably get better: a comment that says more about human perception than about evaluating creative work. Eloine gets the lengths just about right, and seems subversive in doing so. Bryan must also take some small glee in the vaporous cover credits which provide an odd reminder of Duchamp's "Fountain" by identifying the artist himself only as "b.day".

Track Listing
green stump
1) 10-key travelogue
2) silent hula
3) a fast weepy
4) lda is celluloid, ldy
5) zinc cross
short community
1) dangling filaments
2) bonanza illusion
3) apples on a cutting board
sagebrush / deimos
sagebrush:
1) boggy satori
2) pygmy vortices
3) yuwipi inversion
deimos:
4) cloudkin, the
5) dirigible bronze
6) neoprene pt.1

Added: July 6th 2008
Reviewer: Kerry Leimer
Score:
Related Link: Public Eyesore
Hits: 2210
Language: english

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