Steve Oliver & Craig Tattersall

music for screens, turntables and contacts

Cassette

Boomkat Product Review:

An absorbing document of electro-acoustic improv from artist-technicians-teachers Craig Tattersall (aka The Humble Bee) & Steve Oliver, recorded at Salford University between 2011 - 2014 as a series of performances and workshops delivered to their students.

The first piece, ‘screens, coating troughs, microphones, tape looping system’ is an intently quiet room recording of workshop rustle and hum that’s one of the most intriguing pieces in Tattersall’s sprawling catalogue, building from scrapes and location sounds (coughs in the room etc) into an enervated but unsettling cacophony on the downlow.

In contrast, the B-side’s ‘turntable, speaker, microphone, tape loop system & piano’ feels more like a brass band slowed down 1000% as heard from the next soggy valley, gradually accreting distorted overtones, like some lo-fi echo of Ingram Marshall’s ‘Fog Studies’.

Tattersall's work as a tirelessly inventive arranger of small sounds and textures is pretty much unparalleled at this point in his career, not so much because he doesn't sound like anyone else, more because his work is forever evolving in a kind of creative isolation. It’s basically the sound of a guy in his workshop making all sort of things, recording it all, and then dismantling/assembling as the mood dictates. While his work as The Humble Bee fits in with a kind of Ambient zeitgeist, it’s recordings like this - often in collaboration with others - that make us appreciate his creative sprawl so much more: barely-there, but full of life.

Cassette (4)