Exchanges across a dinner table.
SIMON WHETHAM, SLAVEK KWI
(Tentacles Of Perception 2013)
Review by Maria Papadomanolaki
After almost five years of stirring, cutting, peeling, poaching, boiling, beating, blending, chilling, dicing, grinding, kneading, melting, grapping and mincing, and pouring, and grating, and greasing, and heating, and poaching, and slightly roasting, and seasoning and smoking the dinner is finally served.
Two tracks open up a space on the table and offer variations in timbre, texture, always circulating within the realm of the field-recording based electro-acoustic composition. Exchanges does bring the aural-culinary preferences of these two artists in a finely, if not delicately, tuned plain. Whetham’s search of discreet or obscured sonic phenomena merges with Kwi’s analytic approach on the phenomena of perception through what he coins as sound-paintings. Exchanges across a Dinner Table makes it difficult to discern whose hand dips in the mix each time although the titles may give a hint about who has initiated each one of the audio-skeletons that then changed hands for further sculpting and reworking. The resulting two tracks entitled simslao and slaosim progress while Whetham and Kwi affect each of their respective elements in a seemingly dialectic flow. Back and forth, the two tracks reach their final destination by offering an exchange of perspectives on the phenomena of texturing, pacing and layering. Whethams and Kwi’s longstanding engagement with field-recordings in both composition and performance based practices perhaps explains a lot about how this particular release was intended to be made and sound like.
[Simon Whetham up, Slavek Kwi down]
Simon Whetham website
Slavek Kwi website
Tentacles of Perception discography
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