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The maker. JAMES WYNESS
(Gruenrekorder 2011)

The maker appears to our experience as a structural entity in constant dilatation / contraction that brings to my mind the image of a moving caterpillar. Although randomly picked up by imagination the image of the caterpillar seems to connect with the evolutionary conceptual aspects taken into consideration on The maker: Wyness quotes modern american scientists Milford H. Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari on their book Race and Human Evolution on the phrase “There, at the edges, evolutionary forces have different effects than they do at the center of a species’ range…”; the notion of patterns and relationships working differently on the center and on the edges of a structure seems more effectively developed in the actual piece than in the method and text that supports the sound work, so I am going to focus on the sound piece as the strongest aspect where the concept is developed although not in a literal formal way.

The maker‘s strongest formal considerations seems to be matter and time, matter depicted as shape, time depicted as change and what is very interesting about this is what happens between the listener and the piece in terms of spatiality. When we recur to our casual hearing on The maker it seems like we are “inside” the objectual physicality of the piece and this becomes very strong when what seems like recordings made with contact microphones are used. On the other hand the abstract sonority that the recordings acquired when processed by Wyness builds this “sound object” that occurs in our perception and that we relate to through what Pierre Schaeffer called “reduced hearing”: here we feel like we are going through a perceptive journey where our perception
establishes a parallel invisible space that overlaps the actual
physical space that is still present through the use of untreated
field recordings.

The piece on its formality is very efficient -although the poetry seems blurred whether in the description of the method or in the method itself- as in the end The maker is about natural patterns and the dynamics of these patterns on the structures they are part of; the sonority of The maker presents this constantly changing organic sonority that is full of poetry as Wyness manages to put the pure essence of his theoretical considerations into a strong sensible experience.

-Alan Smithee

James Wyness website
Gruenrekorder website
Race and Human Evolution. Milford H. Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari

James Wyness

Sound artist.