Nathan Davis/sylvia Milo - Nathan Davis - Earthworks [CD]

Look around at the place you are right now -- yes, now. Apartment, house, subway car, tool shed, office, wherever. Now imagine this place, with all its material elements and constituent parts, intertwined as they are, as living, with a circulatory system and a pulse. With an inner life, a memory, experiences and a story of itself to tell. Now listen. Nathan Davis's Earthworks is a unique acousmatic piece, a 40-minute conceptual and musical love child of land art, environmental activism and music concrete in which the composer orchestrates the sonic outcome of the extraction, processing and use of common commercial materials of our contemporary built environment. It is an audio tapestry of drilling, fracking, stirring, slurring, scraping, cracking, popping and hammering, with the bright thread of one very intimate human voice woven through it. This particular iteration of Earthworks, originally produced as a sound installation for the exhibit "Planetary Home Improvement: From Just-in-time to Geological Time", is immersive in nature -- both a recording and a full-body experience, primordial and post-industrial. Davis collected field recordings of the raw materials and created a multi-channel sound environment using the materials themselves as speakers, soundboards, and resonators. It is musique concrete as composed through a big box store, and the effect it had on me was mysterious -- compelling and even dreamy. A few times I pictured Morton Feldman walking through the enormous back aisles of a Home Depot -- the "modern quarry" from which this work is drawn -- with an Earthworks-like soundtrack running through his celestial head.In experiencing Davis's work I often find that in addition to composing in the traditional sense, he is also coaxing and conjuring, often in nature, and often with the most basic elements -- minerals, metals, stones, water, air. Much of the power of Earthworks derives from what the exhibition artists describe as "collapsing the ancient and the instant." Of its audience Earthworks demands close attention and attunement to the elements from which it arises. I fully understand that there is a conceptual sophistication and technological mastery at work in pieces like this -- it is experimental music for grown ups -- but I think I'd do Earthworks a disservice by overintellectualizing the pleasures inherent in it. By this I mean that there is something childlike about the work. At least, this is least one of the responses it summoned in me. I experience these "lifeless" materials both talking amongst themselves and speaking to me. When Sylvia Milo begins the piece by intoning the names of these orchestral instruments -- Galvanized steel sheet. Foam insulation. Polycarbonate panel.... -- each one followed by the sounding of its characteristic voice, I'm transported back to my early listening to Peter and the Wolf, when I first heard Boris Karloff introducing the cast of the tale by way of their instrumental voices. As a percussionist Davis possesses a deep attunement to materials and their sonic characteristics. But there are non-material aspects embedded here as well. In this case the political context of the work: it is a response to the industrial plunder of the planet. The experience of listening to these materials speak, hearing their breath and pulses, move us closer to an understanding of this, and to a relationship of awareness and reciprocity with the Earth, whose body we tear apart in order to achieve shelter or convenience, and whose riches we violently transmute into material for use. Ever since the story of Adam and Eve's ejection from the Garden, and certainly before, our human alienation from Nature has been the source of existential grief. Part of the task of poets, artists, philosophers, filmmakers, musicians is to restore us to this Edenic state, in which we are again in peaceful harmony with the Earth and its elements. I hear Earthworks in this restorative tradition, inviting attention to the hidden, the buried, the sonic and subsonic. In turning this all into a sort of music, Davis has created a work that is not merely mournful or unsettling, but also ecstatic. - Peter Catapano