dale berning - The Horse and Camel Stories
This album draws Dale Berning's soundtrack works together onto a single volume, with the main portion of the disc being taken up by the pieces composed for Hiraki Sawa's film Going Places Sitting Down. Some of you may already be familiar with this music thanks to Bo Weavil's LP only release The Horse Stories, but this release marks the first time this music has made it over to CD. In hindsight it all makes far greater sense on a digital format: the lulling electroacoustic treatments are often very quiet and highly detailed. Some of the more concrète sounding tracks, based around location recordings, are best served by headphone listening, particularly the odd, environmental jumble of 'Shadow Moving', which sounds rather like Ikue Mori's laptop abstractions. By the time you get to pieces like 'Piano' and the 'Oven' you'll be wondering how this ever fit into the Bo Weavil roster. If anything, Berning's music has far more in common with the lavish digital productions of the 12k crowd. In fact, there are several notable electronic artists you could compare Berning's work to: caked in vinyl crackle, 'Swimming' and 'Beat' bring to mind Janek Schaefer's turntable experiments, while the music box manipulations of 'Keyhole' evoke Colleen's Les Boites A Musique. The previously unreleased works that round the disc off are every bit as good. There are four more pieces associated with the work of Hiraki Sawa's (including the especially gorgeous eight-minuter 'Cloud') and one further composition, lifted from Stephane Caw's Flock soundtrack. Lovely.
