Like yesterday’s Downstream entry, today’s is of piano subsumed in noise. Yesterday’s noise has an industrial static to it. It is a thick forest of noise through which the piano occasionally becomes apparent. What makes yesterday’s piece, “Week Twenty Nine Project”by Madeleine Cocolas, work as a composition is how the melody’s slow development is at creative odds with that noise — the notes don’t just follow each other, but they in addition have to make sense of the drone through which the emanate.
Today’s piece, “Early Morning With Piano Cityscape” by Victoria Fenner, is a retroactive composition — which is to say, it is field recording that, through selection and framing, can be heard as a composition. What it contains is the everyday sounds of the city, two and half minutes of them, a single swath of a day recorded, extracted, and saved for posterity. There is variety to the sounds in Fenner’s recording: birdsong, traffic, a general municipal whir, aircraft, household activity, and a piano. The piano is just one sound among the many, but because its musicality is explicit it stands out, no matter how loud the other noises, such as the encroaching bus —Â or so it appears — that arrives toward the end, might get.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/victoriafenner. More from Fenner, who is based in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, at magneticspirits.com and twitter.com/VictoriaFenner.