Reviews:
(Vital Weekly) The title is explained on the cover: “Oakum: fibrous strands obtained by plucking and picking apart old ropes, a task often performed during the 18th and 19th centuries by inmates in prisons and workhouses”. Eion Callery plays a shure sm57 amplifying a violin bow in the first piece, then that plus
a string in the next three and in the final piece an electric guitar. He also ‘utilizes a series of overlapping automated limited band-pass filtered feedback patches, controlled with SuperCollider. Occasionally the Supercollider patches are further processed - EQ, reverb and Thomas Mundt’s amazing Loudmax limiter - in Logic audio’, which I must admit went a bit over my head, certainly when listening to the music. There is quite some acoustic scraping of objects or such like with that bow and indeed some kind of electronic process going on. In all five of these pieces (the two bookend pieces being the longest at over 17 minutes the other three relatively short) there is an interesting complexity of sounds going on. The way the acoustic parts collide with the electronic is quite effective. In the four pieces with the violin bow it all sounds pretty similar, but the guitar piece is quite different with a sort of open strumming and with massing up these sounds in a fine orchestral way. This is quite a fine release of someone doing his very own take on electro-acoustic music with some highly satisfying results. - Frans de Waard
(Le Son Du Grisli) C’est ici, semble-t-il, le premier disque d’Eoin Callery, Irlandais travaillant au Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustic (CCRMA) de l’Université Stanford, en Californie. Quand il s’agit de parler de ses intérêts, Callery évoque la musique de chambre électroacoustique, l’installation et l’art sonore. Sur ces cinq pièces, toutes enregistrées en public, il use de multiples bandes, d’un micro Shure SM57, d’un archet de violon (fixé au micro), d’une guitare électrique enfin. S’il est difficile d’imaginer, au seul son, quelle allure a pu avoir l’expérience, le disque consigne les chants dont elle s’est montrée capable. Car, expérimentaux certes, il s’agit bien de chants : passés les premières secondes, une pulsation s’installe et charrie des images (le passage d’un train dans la nuit, une réunion de sirènes électriques, la frappe régulière d’une percussion...) qui renvoient à d’autres pratiques, à d’autres expériences. Mais si son écoute intéresse, on regrettera que le disque ait été pensé comme document avant tout – qui consigne les expériences d’Eoin Callery plus qu’il n’atteste une intention musicale originale, si ce n’est affirmée. - Guillaume Belhomme
(Sound Projector) Oakum is an engaging piece of electronic sound-art created by Irish artist Eoin Callery, who recorded it at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in Stanford. He’s interested in objects, installations, “electroacoustic chamber music”, as he calls it, and builds instruments from found objects. The set-up to Oakum (described on the back cover) is a bit beyond me, but it involves feedback patches controlled by a piece of software, and live processing using more software. Microphones are placed near an object; for ‘Maypole’ it was a violin bow, while for ‘Oakum Day’ parts 1-3, it was a violin bow and string. From this simple array, we’re hearing some very interesting process experiments arising from this amplification. It’s a bit like the “microscopic examination” school of electronic music, except that Callery is clearly more concerned with creating something beautiful and compelling, and not just another slab of digitally-processed feedback. I especially like ‘From Strands to Strings’, where he does it using an electric guitar; this is much less abstract than the violin noise, and it drifts in and out of musical forms in a droney and dreamy way. You can hear everything from traffic sounds to solar winds in this complex harmonic cloud. - Ed Pinsent
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