{"id":10783,"date":"2026-04-11T15:25:20","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T14:25:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/?p=10783"},"modified":"2026-04-11T15:30:34","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T14:30:34","slug":"lance-austin-olsen-new-compositions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/2026\/04\/lance-austin-olsen-new-compositions.html","title":{"rendered":"Lance Austin Olsen: new compositions"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/span>Lance Austin Olsen: Death In The Urban Jungle<\/em><\/a><\/strong> [Confront]. Before I get to the new stuff, let’s backtrack to last year to see where Olsen is coming from now. For many years, the painter\/composer has been producing haunted sound collages, combining instruments, amplified objects and old recordings in a symbiotic relationship with his paintings, either complementing or taking direct compositional knowledge from them. The mood is often dark, and these new pieces have stripped back the former complexity of the collage texture to produce music of greater starkness. Death In The Urban Jungle<\/em> begins with an emphasis on timbre over any particular mood, with strange, synthesised-sounding textures dominating in an unusual way, quite unlike his previous work. (The principal instruments listed here are amplified copper plate, shruti box, guitar, bamboo flute, found tapes.) The work falls into a series of scenes, separated by silences. As it progresses, each scene settles into slow ostinati of unidentifiable sounds which establish their presence and then recede. The introduction of identifiably musical source material in the later stages of the piece seems all the more alienating and ominous when heard in this context.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/span>Lance Austin Olsen: Fascist Cockroaches Over Canada Meet The Resistance<\/em><\/a><\/strong> [Somnimage]. This is a shorter work made for Somnimage’s unknown territory series, coupled with a digital print of one of Olsen’s visual works. Olsen plays solo on amplified acoustic guitar, raw and uncultured, surrounded by extraneous sounds of scraped and rubbed objects, with an added sample as a sting in the tail to add a pointed reference to place and time. The tone is unmistakeable (see title) but doesn’t stoop to propaganda, locating its grievances in its attitude instead of elevating and restricting to a particular set of circumstances. In some ways this is the theme of the piece, as the ills of the world are ever-present, changing only in appearance and in place. <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/span>Jamie Drouin & Lance Austin Olsen: a field far beyond form and emptiness<\/em><\/a><\/strong> [Infrequency Editions]. Time flies, and this is apparently the first album put out by Olsen and likeminded long-time collaborator Drouin in six years. Again, there’s a newfound starkness in their approach here, even as their work together is more ambivalent and neutral in tone than the portents of Olsen’s solo work. Besides the old radios and found tapes, there’s a particular focus on capital-I Instruments here, even if amplified: cello, guitars, dulcimer and piano predominate. It’s a strikingly pointillistic work, with acoustic phenomenon placed front and centre in clear relief. Elements of collage and found sounds are still present but used sparingly, adding inflection points to the surface. Silence is always present, either through implication in the sparseness of the sounds and the low dynamics throughout, or the extended pauses which separates the work into chapters. It’s both the strangest and the most conventional work I’ve heard by the duo; an extended composition of endurance and restraint which is never passive or fully at rest, even in its most subdued moments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lance Austin Olsen: Death In The Urban Jungle [Confront]. Before I get to the new stuff, let’s backtrack to last year to see where Olsen is coming from now. For many years, the painter\/composer has been producing haunted sound collages, combining instruments, amplified objects and old recordings in a symbiotic relationship with his paintings, either […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,44],"tags":[220,167],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10783"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10783"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10809,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10783\/revisions\/10809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}