Short ep released on Feedback Loop, a netlabel from Lisbon, Portugal, "Morning, afternoon, evening" is the first release of Landrecorder, an artist that doesn't want to disclose his name but he is based in the UK.These three tracks mix field recordings and instruments. With the revolution of affordable portable digital recorders such an evolution in the ambient field was expected to bloom and this ep, like the one Padang Food Tigers recently released too is an impressive success in this direction already opened a few years ago by Yuichiro Fujimoto or Daisuke Miyatani.
I guess he walks around in nature with his field recorder in his pocket, collecting various sounds. Back at work, a selection and edition process starts and quite soon he tries and creates combinations with real instruments, using as much the field recordings as an inspiration than as a key element of his then global compositions.
Maybe I'm a too good audience for his compositions because I'm totally obsessed these days by the potential of such explorations, so listening to his music puts me almost in a state of shock. I think the short length of this ep and the narrative progression is a great decision, it is so dense that I'm not sure a full album of such nature would work as good. It is to be lived as an ecstatic experience.
With the same guitar notes repeated over and over at the beginning of "Morning", a melancholic state of mind is induced, accentuated with the voices of crows while someone is walking on a forest path, sightly post processed guitar sounds are used to enrich and add variation to the insomnia atmosphere. It sounds like we are lost in a place where the sun is absent, but the second part of the track with ethereal synth sounds just recreates its rise at dawn with the transmission of almost euphoric emotions. Finally the intervention of the harmonica recalls us down to earth, we have to wake and get up. Morning is about waking up through the dawn, with the first lights of sun touching our sleepy and still closed eyelids, titillating us like a cat would request food.
"Afternoon" is like a summer interlude, taking a nap in a park, with children playing at distance, birds in the trees and somewhere in the background the sounds of a police car telling us we are still belonging to a town.
"Evening" is the most impressive of the three tracks, darker, with reverberated piano and a broken music box distilling a few lost music notes. A strong melancholic feeling invades us with the end of a day we can't avoid. It is deeply moving with the tired voices of birds contemplating a red dying sun as it falls behind trees at the horizon. The apparition of a shy, arpeggio guitar during the second part is utterly moving. Finally all instruments are dissolving while the sound of cars appears as a return to the crude everyday reality. Brilliant.
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