Steffan de Turck is Staplerfahrer, as well as the Dim Records label
head. The Tilburg, Netherlands, label specializes in experimental drone and
musique concrète. Soundscapes, you dig? Do you? Do I? Let’s dig into this one a
little bit and find out. There’s around 45 minutes of it – let’s see how much
of my life I’ll lose, and how much I’ll get back by the end.
1. “THE MATHEMATICS OF NECESSITY”
This track is the ambient recordings within an old studio. Air moves,
static, sounds like somebody’s shaking a sheet of metal, like the ones they use
to make thunder on cartoons. Something clanks. Time passes. Something else
clanks. Some electricity buzzes. A printer sounds – wasting a ton of paper, I’d
imagine. Go green, de Turck! Some scrapes and junk. Then somebody chews cereal,
I guess. Lightbulb pops. Time elapsed: 13:27.
2. “FLORID PERVERSIONS
More abandoned buildings, although according to the bandcamp page de
Turck and his partner Leilani Trowell “executed a ballet of life and death in
this overgrown and vast garden of the house.” OK. I hear a broom sweeping. Then
ambient noise sources, pasted together maybe? I have to crank the volume to
make anything out in the middle of
this one. Absolute silence, John Cage style. More porch noise, or whatever.
This is driving me crazy. Time elapsed: 10:01.
3. “WISSANT”
God almighty, actual music! Look, I’m gonna make an aside here and tell
you that I’m fine with ambient music and musique concrète, I really am. There
are some really brilliant artists out there that mine some incredible depths
and soar to incalculable heights with some really minimal tools. So I’m going
to lay that out there as groundwork for when I say that by “Wissant” here, I’m
really yearning for something other than footsteps in abandoned buildings as
abstract art. Just because you can do
it doesn’t mean you should. And now I bet I’ll get chastised because Steffan de
Turck is some famous outsider artist in his home country. Fine. “Wissant” is 7:38
of organ drone that barely moves. Time elapsed: … oh yeah, I just did that.
4. “KAPOTTE MUZIEK BY…
This is Staplerfahrer’s take on a live performance by Kapotte Muziek, a
reworked composition that took Staplerfahrer seven years to complete. Guess
what? He’s managed to take what sounds like crowd noise and other percussive
sounds and turn them into this artistic composition. Your definition of
“artistic composition” may be different than mine. Time elapsed: 12:35.
So… do you like any of that? Hm.
I gotta be honest – I feel like I was hooked up to Count Rugen’s
machine in The Princess Bride. Four More Broken Elements has sucked the
better part of an hour of my life away. Feels like a year.
--Ryan Masteller
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