The musician and “sound organizer” Jonathan Coleclough takes small sounds and amplifies them. As a result of his careful, artful alchemy, it isn’t just the sounds that are expanded, but the spaces within the sounds. The Rare Frequency podcast (rarefrequency.com/radio) recently posted a live performance by Coleclough, recorded November 20, 2008, for WZBC (wzbc.org) while he was in Boston, Massachusetts, for the Brainwaves Festival. His instrumentation is reported to have consisted of laptop, fishing twine, and an oud (MP3). The work is a plaintive, spectral journey, marked by watery waves of sound, string resonances, and casual percussive elements. The strings undergo the most striking transformation over the course of the piece, moving from rough textures to a chiming presence. It’s a bit hard to imagine in advance that something as common and utilitarian as twine might have sonic complexities as rich as those evidenced here, but such is the wonder of Coleclough’s exploratory art.
More on Coleclough at his website, coleclough.plus.com.