Rien is a short passage of birdsong and other,
less easily identifiable ambient sounds. It really does
appear to want to emulate its title. This brief prologue
is quickly succeeded by a slice of the gently pastoral,
in the form of Garten Am Abend (garden in the
afternoon): all plucked acoustic guitar and more birds.
And so Près De La Lisière proceeds,
borne upon a mixture of breeze and scuffles. The title
means ‘close to the border’. The border
in question appears to exist between something and nothing,
music and sound, noise and silence. As to reference
points, think of Hans Joachim Roedelius, La Dusseldorf,
Durrutti Column, and most particularly of Dallas Simpson’s
Waterpump on Em:t’s 1997 compilation
1197.
Près De La Lisière appears to
be a tabula rasa, a sonic landscape without a subject.
This absence begins to appear to be the raison d’être
of Sinebag’s music, a space into which the listener
can place themselves and, if the stars find their correct
alignment, be softly enveloped. I must confess, however,
that I was a little lost with this ever-so-gentle mixture
of music and sound collage, unsure whether I could supply
what was necessary to make it cohere into anything more
than a collection of seemingly random parts. As I listened,
I first looked at the digipak cover rendered in rich
ochres and sections of cut and pasted landscapes. The
German liner notes defeated my rusty grasp of that language
so I turned to Google for further clues. And, after
skimming over a couple of fairly straightforward reviews,
I found what I was looking for on Sinebag’s own
website in the form of a collection of photographs.
The homepage has some broken image links and the site
is frames-based, but if you look at the navigation on
the left and click ‘art?’ you’ll see
a horizontal row of small images. Select the second
one which appears to be a view of an allotment or similar,
then click the image of an apartment block at the top,
the one with the caption ‘fotos frühjahr
03’. A whole row of images load. These photographs
provide a perfect accompaniment to Près De
La Lisière: they are blurry polaroids of
summer days, a bearded man I assume to be Sinebag himself,
a woman that’s probably his girlfriend, time spent
on a balcony, cloud-scudded skies, empty country roads,
views from a train window. All of them, or at least
their sum totality, are intensely evocative. Beautiful
though the digipak cover is, these images open up a
personal aspect that provides me with a connection to
the music that I might not otherwise have been able
to establish. Perhaps I also appreciate the relative
anonymity of this discovery and its potential for personal
association, who knows.
Colin Buttimer
3.5/5 |
