COPY FOR YOUR RECORDS

Maybe a bookcase falls forward and smashes. There are books all over the floor of the room, some face up with pictures and text showing, some face down giving away little more than their titles. A book about jet propulsion engines is next to a description of rural life in the seventeenth century. Categories are rendered accidentally redundant by small catastrophes.

Eyeing the debris and wondering how to recategorise it all breeds anxiety. Bird identification manuals, a treatise on train travel, notes on the action of waves and a pamphlet on how to build your own radio receiver. We organise things, it’s what we do.

Listening to Pictures of Men can be like finding an old cassette in the loft from 1980. One you recorded sounds on that have long since been forgotten, an early foray into what they call field recording. Some can be recognised for what they are whereas others are dull rumbles or rattles whose provenance is obscure .

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Element 1: There can be no mistaking the agricultural beginnings of Pictures of Men, plunged as we are into a seething melee of farm animals, their bleats and snorts often abrasive and distressing. A pungency evolves as sounds trigger olfactory memories. These non human, bestial voices resurface at various times during the 45 minute duration of the piece from beneath ever changing waves of mutability and scree.

Element 2: An undulating electrical resonance underpins the totality. Sometimes well behind proceedings, but often left to gently unfold, bristle, decay and just be. Like a warm, steady current beneath a turbulent surface. A bit of background microwave radiation soothingly dissolved in perceptive ears.

Element 3: For the souls of those who find pleasure in the unexpected jolt of serendipity, windows open and close and release bursts of captured sound into the world. Unconnected, short yet self-contained passages begin and then abruptly cease. Like opening the doors on a perfectly random advent calendar.

All three elements wrap around each other and operate throughout Pictures of Men with variable degrees of intensity. The work ebbs and flows with the capacity to massage the tympanic membrane or shock it with punishing alacrity. A joyous, extended exploration of the multiplicity of sound, uplifting and liberating in equal measure.

It was created by Farmer and Lacey sending files to each other over a period of several years, so the time taken has allowed this full, intense piece of music to mature and evolve according to the two artists’ individual sensibilities and the unique DNA blueprint of the work itself as life is gradually breathed into it. Oh, and chance too. Chance.

The CD comes with images created by Sarah Hughes depicting dark, imposing houses against white skies with obliterating swathes of pigment defacing them. This is dislocation, disharmony and anguish at the heart of suburban domesticity made visible. It sets the scene for the sense of uneasiness engendered by the music, at least at certain points in the composition.

Maybe a bookcase falls forward and smashes. There are books all over the floor of the room. The first one you pick up is called Pictures of Men by P. Farmer and D. Lacey and flicking through the pages there’s a photograph of a fighter plane over the source of the river Severn, an article on paint strippers and a threnody for collapsing turntables. That’s approximately the size of it.

- Chris Whitehead, The Field Reporter

Pigs. And geese.

I'm guessing if you surveyed field recordings issued over the last ten or so years, especially those created by musicians not exclusively involved in that area, insects would be over-represented in the animal sounds category. Birds too, perhaps. Distant dogs are always good to lend a sense of space, even of desolation. btw, if there's not an indie rock band called Distant Dogs, there should be. But we don't get nearly enough pigs. Until now.

Perhaps meant ironically, "Pictures of Men" commences with five or more minutes of wonderfully snorting, slimy, guffawing pigs, accompanied by a horde of geese in some state of upset. Maybe Farmer's merely capitalizing on the latent potential in his surname. Whatever the case, it's a welcome and wonderful sound world and it sticks out its collective snout a couple of times further in. When a sine-like tone enters, you can't help but think it a wry comment on Michael Pisaro's careful and beautiful insertions of sines into field recordings ("Transparent City"), attempting to approximate some basic tone in the wind, etc. Things do move on, more or less in a manner I tend to think of as cinematic. That is, it's easy to visualize scenes accompanying the music, as rough and tumble and differentiated as they are. There's an attractive sort of lurching quality to it, as one hears trains (here, an engagingly loose sound) hiccuping against brief silent swatches, massive flocks of birds (again, presented in a way not normally heard, hear a dense layering of reedy whistles), and a helluva lot more. Farmer and Lacey do a really fine job at melding dynamic levels, textural variation and "tempo" changes; it's active, even hurtling, picking up the listener and carrying him/her along, offering tantalizing glimpses of activity along the shoreline, lingering for perhaps a moment then flowing on.

About midway through, they shift gears, beginning with a lovely, soft, burred drone, eventually interrupted by harsh static--seriously harsh at points. Thee's a more fragmentary feel in effect at this point, a quiet, stubborn hum amongst random(ish) taps and clangs, rather desolate; a skittering sound that appears is like an abandoned robotic insect, helplessly flitting about the floor and windows. Matters slowly begin to congeal somewhat, the menagerie returns, automotive noises intrude, the flow stutters again (beautifully, with ratcheting, gear-like sounds) before it suddenly flattens out into a landscape abutting an airport, planes ascending just overhead, water nearby. Waiting for pigs and geese.

A really strong, immensely satisfying work.

- Brian Olewnick, Just Outside

Patrick Farmer and David Lacey are both improvising musicians with a percussive bent, though Farmer is quick to point out that it’s been a while since he last sat down at a drum kit. “Pictures of Men” is, I believe, the first collaborative recording from them as a duo, though they have both previously worked with musicians such as Lee Patterson, Angharad Davies, and Rhodri Davies; Farmer is a co-founder of the Set Ensemble and the online label Compost and Height, while Lacey has co-organised numerous performances of experimental music in Dublin under the banner i-and-e.

The work they have created is a slippery fish to grasp. The single 45-minute track begins in a farmyard among the honking of geese and the grunting and squealing of pigs. The sounds are shrill and abrasive, yet also strangely fascinating and unique. Occasionally an industrial hum is heard, followed by a slam; one thinks of the bolts used in the ‘processing’ of animals in an abattoir, but there is nothing to confirm or contradict this interpretation. The piece remains in the farmyard for some considerable time, before new material recalls a series of other locations, vaguely sketched: a train journey, an aviary, a shoreline. Abrupt cuts between locations, and between locations and silence, are often emphasised using devices such as the sound of a stone or metal plate being dragged. One is never entirely sure what one is hearing. Towards the middle of the piece, noises produced by the artists using manipulated electronics and percussion instruments begin to be introduced, but it’s hard to specify exactly where the field recordings end and the studio recordings begin. Later on the squealing pigs return; the piece ends with two jet aircraft flybys.

It seems to me that “Pictures of Men” is aimed at least partly at undoing the coherent sense of location and ‘soundscape’ presented by many works of field recording, using sudden rapid cuts and sounds that are either underdetermined and ambiguous or overdetermined and uncannily ‘hyperreal’ to disrupt the listener’s construction of a consistent sound world. My guess is that this is not simply revelling in chaos for chaos’ sake, but rather a warning against complacency in thinking that the meaning of sounds (and by extension the sources that present them) are naturally self-evident. The sounds in “Pictures of Men” do not function as legible, easily intelligible signs; on the contrary, those that are most immediately identifiable (the pigs, the jet aircraft) also seem the most bizarre, sticking out like sore thumbs in the neatly ordered rows of habitual perception. It is as if the object disappears behind its sound (philosopher Timothy Morton would say, “the object withdraws”).

What this all adds up to is a release with the power to unsettle and fascinate at the same time. We are used to inferring a simple, straightforward connection between a sound and its source, but after listening to “Pictures of Men”, other works of field recording that previously sounded so transparent begin to cloud over. Time to listen some more then.

- Nathan Thomas, Fluid Radio