{"id":7390,"date":"2019-03-18T21:36:38","date_gmt":"2019-03-18T21:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/?p=7390"},"modified":"2019-03-18T21:36:38","modified_gmt":"2019-03-18T21:36:38","slug":"works-on-paper-gil-sanson-and-lance-austin-olsen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/2019\/03\/works-on-paper-gil-sanson-and-lance-austin-olsen.html","title":{"rendered":"Works on Paper: Gil Sans\u00f3n and Lance Austin Olsen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Feels like I’ve been away forever. I got a bunch of new albums I want to talk about and a superb Alvin Lucier concert I went to last week, but right now I have to say something about this new release by Gil Sans\u00f3n and Lance Austin Olsen. I got all excited about Olsen’s music<\/a> last year, with his visual approach to making music. A real artist<\/em>, y’know? He makes paintings, some of which function as musical scores, and takes a very collage-type approach to his recordings. <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/span>On his Another Timbre CD last year, Olsen produced a multitracked realisation of a graphic score by the Venezuelan artist Gil Sans\u00f3n. I’d described A Meditation on the History of Painting<\/em> as “like painting, a synthesis of gesture and editing, with traces of the two processes preserved in the medium”. On this new album, Works on Paper<\/a><\/em>, Olsen and Sans\u00f3n give an extended presentation of their technique of creative exchange. Disc 1 features two realisations of Olsen’s painting\/score Pra Mim<\/em>, recorded by Sans\u00f3n in Caracas. On the second disc the roles are reversed, with Olsen in Victoria, Canada recording two realisations of Sans\u00f3n’s graphic score Meditations<\/em>. For two hours, the air teems with tantalising connections, potentialities. <\/p>\n

As with painting, the fabric of the music hovers between fragments of narrative and unspecified affect. It’s an elusive music, part radio drama, part collage, part pure sound. The sense of meaning is always present, both in content and form, but is left to the listener to find for themselves. Sampled music, taken straight or manipulated, combine with field recordings, musical instruments, isolated phrases spoken or sung and mysterious electronic clicks and buzzes. Similarities between the two artists abound, inviting further connections and comparisons to be made between the two minds at work, one in British Columbia and the other in Venezuela. The sounds are captured beautifully. Within each realisation, certain elements repeat, or seem to. Everything becomes suspended in a dream-like state, fully aware but inexplicable. <\/p>\n

The pieces have been sequenced so that words, spoken or sung, appear less and less as time goes on. Pieces end on extended hiatus, with aural figuration giving way to empty spaces, alive with background sound. The final Meditation<\/em> is wordless, with Olsen interpreting Sans\u00f3n’s score with layers of sparse, amplified sounds and guitar. The album’s an ideal follow-up to last year’s Dark Heart<\/a><\/em> release.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Feels like I’ve been away forever. I got a bunch of new albums I want to talk about and a superb Alvin Lucier concert I went to last week, but right now I have to say something about this new release by Gil Sans\u00f3n and Lance Austin Olsen. I got all excited about Olsen’s music […]<\/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":[184,167],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7390"}],"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=7390"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7394,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7390\/revisions\/7394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}