Earthworks describes itself as ‘a love child between land art, environmental activism and musique concrète.’ It was originally the soundtrack to an installation entitled Planetary Home Improvement; From Just-in-time to Geological Time. It’s not easy to do justice to an installation, a work that exists in a defined space and in which you can generally wander around, through a recording. Composer and percussionist Nathan Davis does it very well, however – perhaps it’s best to use headphones to really get the impression of being in the middle of a vast artificial space.
It’s reminiscent of Pierre Mercure’s music for Jacques Giraldeau’s film La forme des choses (1965). But Davis’ work is very calm from start to finish, and one inevitably thinks of the technique aimed at triggering a process of ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’ (this is the translation offered by the Grand dictionnaire terminologique du Québec of the expression ‘autonomous sensory meridian response – ASMR’). Right from the start, Syvlia Milo’s voice is whispering. She whispers the names of objects used in the construction of a house: “Galvanized steel sheet. Foam insulation. Polycarbonate panel”… The text she recites is an adaptation of instructions found in renovation videos, and the accompanying sounds are all the same: drilling, fracturing, scraping, cracking, splintering, hammering… But always in a very atmospheric way.
In addition to the samplings made and arranged by Davis, we can also hear, without necessarily recognising them, contributions from his colleagues in the International Contemporary Ensemble: Katinka Kleijn (cello), Levy Lorenzo (percussion), Josh Modney (violin) and Joshua Rubin (clarinet). The project is a reflection on the fact that it is perhaps the earth, our ultimate home, that we should now begin to renovate… The video is no doubt more explicit on this subject, but Nathan Davis’s work on sound and its use in space is impressive.
