Zenapolæ

Price: CD $7.50

Description

During a trip to perform at the Burning Man Festival, Erin Anderson brought along her trusty tape-recorder and recorded hours of interaction with the crowds. Using only these field recordings, non-linear editing techniques, and digital effects, she has created a richly-textured abstract audio collage.

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Album Reviews

intellectos

Fidget is Erin Anderson. What makes this CD very interesting is that all the sounds on this disc are sampled from the Burning Man Festival. As her press sheet says, "Using only these field recordings, non-linear editing techniques, and digital effects" she created the whole album. This may sound neat but the album suffers in patches because of this very premise. Before Fidget Erin Anderson spent years as half of the persistent indietronica duo Flowchart. Like Flowchart, Fidget is all about soundscapes, repitition, and introspection. Erin recorded hours of interaction with the crowds which you hear throughout the album. The nature of an album with limited sounds are obvious (i.e. tracks blend into each other to easily) but tracks like Silly Questions and Whatz Your Name? are the exception. This track is one of the few on here that builds up and features a trancey sampled beat and spooky voices. The intelligible samples that pop up in various spots are enjoyable too. On the end of Subvert the Subversion you hear a babbling voice discuss the fault of American Middle East policy in a naive and muddled way or the end of another track which features comedic attempts at a Beach Boy classic. The disc is entertaining where most within this genre simply fail "Pams and .." is consistent.

intellectos, 2003

Splendid E-Zine

For all of us who've spent time at an outdoor festival, this collection of assembled "field recordings" (collected at the Burning Man Festival) makes you reconsider just what you experienced that day. All those overheard conversations, endless sound checks and barking dogs are reassembled here into trippy, metallic loops that squawk, bleep, and careen their way across twelve tracks. Though much of the music is consumed with these rhythmic intervals of spliced-noise, we also get the occasional "original" in extended form. (Imagine one of Burning Man's more philosophically inclined spectators holding forth on "subverting the subversion".) It's true that these fractured soundscapes can make for an almost visual experience, but PAMS ends up sounding a bit cold and claustrophobic, like the soundtrack to a dying party filtered through ten different channels. It's more successful when it gets into a groove and fully develops an idea, as with the droning, almost religious incantations of "yeah yeah yeah" on "The Runaround". Taken as a whole, the complex, searching loops rarely meet on the same plane, leaving the listener to reconcile the many interesting though often incompatible layers. The stories you'll tell yourself to go with these complex soundscapes have some compelling characters and gripping events, but, to my regret, don't always end well.

Rob Guthrie, Splendid E-Zine, 2003

Pine Bluff Commercial

PAMS stands for Pink Alien Monkey Swine. Which is really all you need to know. Almost, anyway. I won't try to describe Fidget's sound. Suffice it to say they are sort of a fusion of the staple sounds of the experimental realm. Vocal samples chatter around elements of noise. The listener succumbs to a strangely engrossing symphony of sound.

Kristofer Upjohn, Pine Bluff Commercial, 2003

Aural Innovations

Each year, thousands gather in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, US for The Burning Man Festival, an “annual experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance”. Why do I mention this? Because PAMS and Other Conspiracies is a series of sound collages built entirely from field samples recorded at Burning Man. These recordings were layered and put together using electronic processing and non-linear editing techniques.

On first listen, I had not read anything about this recording, and I admit I was a bit baffled by the strange three-dimensional landscapes of noise I heard. I’m sure many listeners would not even consider this music, but to those who embrace John Cage’s definition, “anything that is intended to be music is music” may find this quite an interesting odyssey. After I had read about the source of the recordings used, I was able to listen to the compositions in a new light.

Fidget is Erin Anderson, one half of the electronic experimental duo Flowchart. On PAMS and Other Conspiracies, she takes the concept of “radical self-expression” to heart. This seems as much about Anderson’s experiences at Burning Man as anything. And from the opening siren-like screech of Just Look at the Sun, it’s clear her experience was an active and exciting one. Samples of voices talking, background noises, people making music, etc., are manipulated electronically, and inter-cut in a sonic pastiche. Sometimes Anderson works the samples into a rhythm of sorts, like the bizarre noise structures of Whatz Your Name?, which incorporates chanting and numerous other sounds that drift in and out of the rhythm. Other times, she lets the samples speak for themselves, like on Subvert the Subversion, where a neo-hippie gabs on about the problems with government foreign policy.

It’s all fascinating, to be sure, but not very easy to listen to. Anderson is doing her own thing here, oblivious to the audience, and they can choose to listen, or walk away. But isn’t that what radical self-expression is all about?

Jeff Fitzgerald, Aural Innovations, 2003

Credits and Licenses

Copyright © 2002 by Erin Anderson.
All rights reserved.