What we said at the time…

If you’ve been listening to Resonance FM lately, then hopefully you’ll have picked up on some of Lee’s show. For the past 2 month or so, he’s been presenting his audio sketchbook, a series of 30 min slots, at the end of which I’m always left with the desire to listen to the world a lot more closely. I’m also, if I’m honest, left with a kind of jealousy as to how Lee can observe the world around him, particularly on a tiny scale and transform those micro recordings into something which is so musically compelling.

On this weeks radio show Lee played a series of recordings in which he’d tried to take the noise pollution around his home and transform it into something less annoying, more musical. He played a recording of school children at play-time back though a plastic coke bottle, repeatedly re-recording and playing it back again in real time in a Lucier inspired, ‘I’m sitting in a room’ way, until he had transformed a raucous babble into the most hauntingly glassine of drones. Lee has an incredible ear for the tiniest of sounds, setting up processes that make the minute real, understandable, and crucially, musical. In a performance that might be the use of tiny mic’s to amplify the energy released by the burning of seeds and nuts, the ever-changing drone of sparklers or the dynamic pops and bursts of glass bottles as they cool. His work is always both visually intriguing and sonically charming.