
The polar extremes of the holiday season are remarkable for their seeming incongruity, perhaps most notably in terms of psychic ambience: on the one hand, a manic consumerism; on the other, a sense of reflection and hushed anticipation. Guy Birkin ponders the latter by taking existing seasonal recordings, a pair of them, and forming from them something new, something singular.
Both of his chosen source documents are explicitly seasonal. There’s a church choir and there’s a brass band. The congregation sings “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and the band plays “Once in Royal David’s City.” The choir is accompanied by a pipe organ. The brass band, on the other hand, is accompanied by various externalities: that recording was made from a distance and is infused with everyday noise. The resulting work, which Birkin titled “Christmas Ambience,” is very much an extended take on the latter approach to sound, in which context seems to submerge text, yet where the result is an aura with more meaning, more feeling, than the text might have ever had on its lonesome. It’s a slow, solemn piece, yet it seems to glisten in its seeming stasis:
Bikrin also provided some explanation for how he accomplished his piece:
The recordings were pitch-shifted and stretched with FFT, then layered together and the process repeated. The original version of this track was over 18 minutes long, but the most interesting section was its beginning in which the choral and brass sounds are barely audible above the background noise. It took quite a lot of work to simplify the track and concentrate only on the most ambiguous sounds.
Track originally posted for free streaming and download at soundcloud.com/notl. More on Birkin at twitter.com/guybirkin and aestheticcomplexity.wordpress.com.




The word “drone” is not unlike the word “punk” in the way it offers to annihilate itself. But as with punk’s inherent contradictions, drones aren’t necessarily anonymous, aren’t necessarily formless, and certainly aren’t interchangeable. A drone contains sounds, and those sounds can transmit sensation, can suggest the sensibility of the artist who committed them to tape, can reference other cultural artifacts, intentionally and otherwise. The drone that is “Rites of Zen” by Marc Broude at first buries what appears to be ritual chanting in a haze of quavering noise straight out of a late-1960s BBC Radiophonic score for a science-fiction audio drama. Is it ritual, is it sci-fi romanticism, are these things set in opposition to begin with? There is drama to “Rites of Zen,” certainly, but it isn’t explicitly narrative-based. It’s an extended piece, over an hour and a quarter straight through, and to the extent that it changes it does so slowly, which means that the ear is more likely to notice changes in the short term than the long. For example, human cries dissolve into the ether. What seems like it could be ancient plainchant may, in fact, be a momentarily magnified whir of some tiny mechanism. The overarching sound, a kind of blanket hum, could be a harsh wind moving across a bleached desert, or a sine-wave sent through a modest filter. If there is a theme it may be this: Matters of scale evaporate (