A single tape loop makes its course, round and round. It does so out of one tape recorder and into another and then back to the first again, over and over, or at least over and over for the three minutes and thirty seven seconds of “Rainy Season.” The track is by the always inventive and often, as here, playful Famhi M, or Fahmi Mursyid, who is based in Bandung, Indonesia. The sound of “Rainy Season” is alternately frazzled and desolate, sharp and distant, all thanks to, as Mursyid describes it, the tools employed: “The texture of analogue magnetic tape, high frequency noise, crackle, magnetic particles, and hiss.” The source audio is field recordings, here transformed into a whole other fictional soundscape. Listen with your eyes closes, and get transported. Open your eyes, and appreciate the structural accomplishment, the devices partially disassembled and put to uses far beyond their original engineering, the fragile loop traveling a distance unintended for this archaic material. There’s a connection to be considered between the sound and the structure, between the artifice of the imagined world and the purposeful jury-rigging of the devices.
Video originally posted at youtube.com. More from Fahmi Mursyid at ideologikal.bandcamp.com, soundcloud.com/ideologikal, and fahmi-mursyid.weebly.com.
Wow. Super. Simple and inventive. Thanks much.