JUSTIN BENNETT

Noise map

CD, Spore Records

This CD is called “noise map” and this is exactly what you get. Justin Bennett builds enormous landscapes of sound, mostly noise, in various ways and always gets you thinking: how big can it get? From the harsh and almost unbearable beginning to the droning centre-piece of “noise map”, the fifteen-minute title track, you’ll be either abashed by the close and direct approach of noise or sucked into the maelstrom of sounds and pushed around like a little piece of fluff in the winds above this extraordinary country created by Justin Bennett.

Interestingly, this CD is not as uncompromising as some of his other works, where he left field-recordings of mosques in Tangier completely unedited, so the listener could take an auditive travel to a place and time far apart from his own home. “Noise map” is also not as harsh and digital as some of Bennett’s other deconstructed and edited (I don’t want to use the word “composed”) works of late. Moreover, whenever you think that you cannot stand the noise anymore, he will take it back. Most of the times completely, leaving you bare and naked with just a few digital clicks and cracks to realize you are still alive. Masonna would have put one more on the listener at that moment, but then the Japanese Noisers never had as much structure as Bennett.

This CD surrounds you with noise, opens up space all around you and then closes it again. Or rather, destroys them. Just as cities and buildings are erected and then torn down again or left to wither away, naturally destroyed from Pompeii to San Francisco, or destroyed by mankind from Carthago to Dresden, the space in your head is being built and then destroyed again. But, who builds and destroys them? Is it Justin Bennett or the listener or a complex conflagration of both? No answer is possible. It’ll also make you question your stereo or your habit of listening to music with headphones, because the way you arrange your speakers and the volume you choose to play “noise map” on will influence your listening as much as your current psychic and physical state.

Only after about 25 minutes Bennett introduces the first sounds that are outside the range of white noise – a relief, definitely, but soon washed over and deconstructed again into something completely new. After the first third of the CD, with its harsh changes and extreme frequencies and the second third with its two epic noise-tracks, they dynamics and sounds change in the final third (starting with track six and seven). The sounds of electric currents, the trickling water of a small stream, the cluster of words of a group of people speaking in a public place. With track eight “mascletà” he even uses some sort of rhythmical sounds – a big pounding bass-string or modulated drum in various heights and then some more drums and then slowly evolving into a rhythmical drone. The easiest piece to digest on this CD, which says a lot about the music on here.