BIG CITY ORCHESTRA

Hi-fi stereo test record for pets

The Super 8 Inch Series / Dhyana Records

Lately, noise starts creeping back into my life. From the street-level hissing of traffic to the screeching and steady trance-banging of rails on the real side of life to the actual noise-explorations of artists on the sonic / auditive side of life. The beauty of it. The impeccable and infinite variations so largely expanding the possibilities of music – “the architecture of heaven” (that is a booktitle I have seen in an arts-craft-store between all kinds of monographies on Renoir, Picasso, Cézanne and the boring lot). And since summer is coming I’ll open my windows wide and let it all in like a cool breeze to fill my lungs and brain and heart. But at the moment, it has started to snow again, which means that I’ll go and get a second sweater to wear. Like the old Chinese saying, today is obviously a day of several clothings and very much like my late granny, I start to freeze as soon as I see the snow. The essence of life coded in always re-newed abstract terms: avantgarde. The essence of sound in such an environment: noise as good as music.

Big City Orchestra have released an acclaimed and accomplished CD on Dhyana-Records titled “pixies” which I described as “a trip into a fantastic landscape filled with sounds and rhythms” and that “sometimes it is dreamlike at other times like standing on a lively intersection in a foreign city” and that is still true for this release, so I’ll just repeat it. Beautiful drones that are interwoven with subtle and sometimes not so subtle noises and field recordings. Side A starts off quite harsh and disturbing, like an old Japanese-Noise-record, but it soon evolves into a multi-levelled but harmonic noise-field, like standing on an airport or within a big hall of a factory, with a helicopter steadily rotating somewhere close by and the rush of a busy highway in the vicinity.

As you try to take in all the sonic evidence and information, your mind shifts from one source to the next, highlighting the high wailing sounds at one time and then the distorted bubbling the next. Ironically, at some point you won’t be able to tell, if it is just your mind highlighting or blending out, or if Big City Orchestra are changing things around in the mix. Until you realize that it really doesn’t matter. Noise-music, to me, is just as much about learning about frequencies and sounds as it is about learning about your sense of hearing and the psychological implications of it.

Side B is a completely different yet quite similar piece of music. Again, they’ll start off quite noisy and distorted with some jagged and jaded vocals in the back, but then the soundscape ripens into something larger, more agonizingly beautiful and encompassing. There is definitely a rather straightforward dynamic spanning this construction. Like one flight through space or the wonderful world beneath the surface of the sea. The take-off might be a little rough but they’ll take you down soft and easy like falling asleep.

There is a lot of oppositions and irony on this little slab of vinyl from the other side of the world (quite literally, Dhyana records have to ship these eight inches from New Zealand, where they are being handmade by some poor dude with a pressing-machine for records.) The highly sophisticated sound-construction and the “downgrading” title of a “test record” might be one example. The combination of serious artistic aspirations and the never too serious spirit of punk forming a funny couple that is again another contrast to the effect of the sounds on the listener. And ever so on, like a crazy dream. Regarding the art-world, which includes the substrata of sound-producers interested in noise on a very low and outer level, as anything else but a crazy dream will only proof harmful to the human inside the artist.