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Janek Schaefer, "Phoenix & Phaedra Holding Patterns"
This performance was commissioned for 2009's A Thing About Machines festival, an event devoted to the theme "Spaces Speak."  Such a theme is right up Janek's alley, as he has long been interested in the role that architecture plays in the listening experience.  He is also fascinated by the fact that we are constantly immersed in a sea of unnoticed waves and transmissions, so he artfully combined them by transmitting some components of the piece to radios distributed to audience members throughout the concert hall.  In album form, sadly, Janek's clever spatial and acoustic manipulations are unavoidably lost, but Phoenix & Phaedra is still an enjoyably warm and crackling soundscape by one of the world's finest sound artists.
Despite the fact that this is a live performance commissioned to meet specific conceptual criteria, Phoenix & Phaedra Holding Patterns is very much a serious musical composition (rather than a mere installation or performance experiment) and a major work in Schaefer's discography.  In fact, he wrote it to celebrate the birth of his son (Phoenix).  Unfortunately, I have no idea how Phaedra fits into Janek's vision, as her story involves false accusations of rape, sea monsters, and suicides, none of which seem to occur here.  Instead, the six pieces here are largely based on decidedly less lurid Shruti box drones.  Schaefer is far too idiosyncratic to make a conventional drone album though, especially since much of his notoriety stems from innovative use of found sound and his singular talent for modifying record players.  Given that, it is no surprise that this material is pleasingly varied and unpredictable, but it is pretty astonishing how "musical" Schaefer is able to be without much in the way of "real" instrumentation.  I imagine it is not easy to construct a coherent, engrossing, and constantly shifting hour of music with some records, some field recordings of birds and machinery, and a box that makes a drone (used far more sparingly than I would expect).
The strongest and most immediately gratifying moments come when Janek makes unexpected textural or melodic detours, such as the "dying music box in a wind storm" interlude in the brief "Eyrie of the Phoenix."  More importantly, however, there is a very exacting mind dictating the ebb and flow of all the various sounds, so this isn't a drone album with some unexpected elements so much as an absorbing, surreal, and oft emotionally resonant aural narrative.  Happily, Schaefer usually displays a great deal of tact and nuance too, eschewing conventional build-ups and climaxes in favor of oases of blissful shimmering nirvana ("Red Plumes," for example) linked by enigmatic passages of collaged field recordings.  The overall experience is akin to a good story elusively unfolding as a series of fragmented impressions.
The only minor issues that I have with this album are that some of the Shruti box-centric passages are not uniquely Janek Schaefer-esque and that it is slightly more successful as an artistic statement than as a piece of music.  The music is certainly quite good, but a large part of my enjoyment stemmed from an intellectual appreciation for Janek's high-wire act of weaving a complex and compelling tapestry of disparate threads together without ever using density as a crutch.  Schaefer's mastery of his craft is impressive–it is very rare to hear abstract music that is this deliberate, uncluttered, and clear.   I definitely wish I had caught the actual event, but this makes for a very rewarding consolation prize.
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