Guy in the parking lot directly below our balcony is power-washing his van’s guts out. An auto-enema, I guess? The sound is a multi-layered hiss and hum that sounds like a decent, idling vacuum cleaner and stovetop tea kettle are vying for attention…these howls then cut short by an actual, industrial wet/dry vac, which sounds more like a diesel-guzzling construction vehicle’s slow crawl than any debris harvesting shop-vac I’ve ever handled. &Now enter a commercial shop-vac (not making this shit up) into our apartment’s block-long corridor, just outside the apartment door, it’s accordion trunk breathing heavy, it’s snout scraping the (fucking filthy) crevice where carpet and chipped wall trim meet, desperately searching for peanut shells, toe nails, whatever it can.
The above account of why I’ve woken up so fucking early after a poor night’s sleep fits in with these here sounds captured by Seeded Plain pretty well, my current surrounding urban taunts droning in sync and contrasting with SP’s (Bryan Day’s/Jay Kreimer’s) percussion-heavy explorations (nearly all being electro-acoustically wrung via pluck, skitter, scrape, rub, thwack) via their impressive collection of home made reverberant devices, something fierce! &let’s face it; deep listening to Eh? Records’ stuff won’t get done by many in an anechoic chamber. There’ll always be some outside color bleeding through when listening to their subtle, nuance-packed catalogue*, and listening to “Flying Falling” whilst being surrounded by commercial-grade dirt-suckers has leant me an entirely different narrative (albeit post-apocalyptic now) than when I listened to it, yesterday, amidst the relative quiet of crepuscular birds a-courting from telephone lines and coral gums that surround our complex.
Where now, it sounds as if I am INSIDE a wheel-house of unaligned gears that don’t get along, but rather fight over rubber belts, claw at the tin skin encasing them, and attempt to shed their grime in hopes to rust back to stasis, yesterday, I felt I was bearing witness to the communiques of every single jungle animal and every single plains animal capable of producing a noteworthy utterance, all these fauna taking turns at the tree line to vent -and a good amount of overlapping argument did ensue- to one another, all the while, those incapable of moaning, shrieking, or howling attempted an animal morse-code on whatever rock or destroyed poacher’s vehicle door they could find nearby.
Which is to say, Seeded Plain does one helluva job coaxing the most dynamic, enigmatic -and just plain old WILD- sounds possible from the devices they’ve personally cobbled together, whether they contain resonant chambers, strings/cords, loose metal clumps of varying smoothnesses/roundnesses, and/or contact microphones. “Flying Falling” is a goddamn trip, no matter where you’re listening from, physically, and metaphysically. Talk about versatile!
— Jacob An Kittenplan
*even when listened to at maximum volume responsible, which is highly recommended, too!
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