Cherry Beach Project "silo 11" ( MS35 )
“Cherry Beach is located at the end of a small, artificially created peninsula on which various heavy industrial facilities and toxic no-man’s lands decay. The area is infamous as a site out of public sight for police to engage in ‘off the record’ activities. Our location was within a complex of vacant waste oil storage facilities on Cherry Beach. While recording on the night of June 5th, 2004, we were forced to abandon our equipment after discerning that violent activities were taking place in one of the seemingly abandoned structures nearby. We returned at dawn to retrieve our equipment, which we were able to do successfully, only to be pursued out of the area and down the beach by two unidentified men. Fortunately we escaped unharmed, with our recordings intact. Since this time the entire compound and all of its reverberant structures have been demolished, leaving only an empty lot. The material presented here has been selected from two days of recording on site, but otherwise left untreated and unprocessed.”
– Joda Clément/Nigel Craig, November 2006
Order on-line at Mystery Sea
REVIEWS:
THE WIRE # 278 – Outer Limits | Jim Haynes
Cherry Beach is located in a lakefront region of Toronto that had once been a heavily utilised industrial zone. When the area was abandoned and left to a toxic fate, it also developed an unsavoury reputation as a site for the police to intimidate homeless and drunk denizens. Despite the warning signs, Canadian sound artists Joda Clément and Nigel Craig were attracted by the decayed resonance of the vacant buildings on Cherry Beach back in 2004. Armed with branches, empty bottles, wine glasses and whatever else was lying around, the two surreptitiously recorded a quiet ritual of acoustic activities. Closely responding to the natural reverb of the cavernous metal architecture, Clément and Craig emerged with a wonderful set of slow progressing bellows, sweeping gestures and protracted chimes. More often than not, the Cherry Beach Project offers a far more mysterious and evocative atmosphere than the abandoned building strategies of the celebrated Japanese improvisor Kiyoharu Kuwayama.
The Wire"
TOUCHING EXTREMES | Massimo Ricci
Joda Clément and Nigel Craig had a dangerous experience in Cherry Beach, an isolated place in an artificial peninsula “on which various heavy industrial facilities and toxic no man’s lands decay”. After realizing the recordings heard here – which include nocturnal stillness, metallic scraping, insufflations into bottles, dragged objects and breathtakingly evocative distant airplanes – they had to escape after becoming aware of ongoing “violent activities” in one of the nearby structures. Even after having rescued their equipment in the early hours of the morning, Clément and Craig were fronted by two unknowns who expelled them from the area. Knowing this story is important for a better appreciation of these untreated, unprocessed sounds, which seem to represent the voices and the whispers of hidden presences advising the two comrades to leave the place before it’s too late. The connection between the raw harmonics of the metals and the passing planes is absolutely intriguing, the threatening reverberant thuds heard in the fifth section letting even the listeners at home raise their heads in alerted preoccupation. Overall, an enigmatically fascinating piece of suburban sound art.
Touching Extremes
EARLABS | Larry Johnson
Definitely furthering Mystery Sea’s goal of releasing “highly immersive music” and of the fascination with the “archetypal liquid state”. Joda Clément and Nigel Craig bring their own version of deep listening to the label’s “night-sea drones“ conceptual series by way of their Cherry Beach Project – Silo 11 CD-R.
Anymore I hesitate before I label a release “experimental” because it’s an adjective that has been considerably over applied and now tends to encompass such a wide range of sounds that it no longer carries the weight that it once did. However, in the case of Cherry Beach Project – Silo 11 there’s enough unpredictability present in which the outcome relies more on randomness than on a carefully laid out path or deliberate editing that “experimental” is an appropriate descriptor.
Using the natural reverberation properties of an empty waste oil storage tank as the audio processing tool, various objects (branches, bottles, wine glasses, stones, cymbal, bow, finger piano, water, voices, plastic tubes, structural remnants, etc.) are played/manipulated within its confines and the reflected sounds are recorded directly to digital audio tape. It shares some similarities with Jeph Jerman’s animist orchestra approach except for the important difference that the sounds of the played objects don’t remain pristine because they are unintentionally processed as a result of being affected by the intrinsic acoustics of the storage tank itself.
Even though there are a variety of incongruent and discordant sounds competing with one another, the six untitled tracks come across as highly listenable with some evanescent moments of surprising concord. Deep drones, metallic chimes, bowed tones, distorted timbres, forlorn groans, reverberating drips, deep bass resonances, sporadic percussive bursts, and even the real sounds of an airplane flying overhead making for almost forty-minutes of fascinating listening.
Earlabs
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JODA CLÉMENT MOVEMENT + REST CD (A20)
JODA CLÉMENT MOVEMENT + REST CD (A20)
“Movement + Rest is the result of two years work listening, collecting and arranging sound. My recordings attempt to blur the distinction between electronic, acoustic and ambient sources. Analog or acoustic instruments are used because of the direct physical process with which they generate sound. I take field recordings from sounds that habitually go unnoticed in the daily environment (airplanes overhead, trains passing in the night, the broken radiator at the end of the hall, falling snow), as well as those which are less accessible for hearing (the abandoned subway tunnels of Toronto, a muffled cab ride through Guadalajara, contact mics on Jacques Cartier Bridge, etc.). I combine nondescript omnipresent noises that surround us with instrumental and vocal recordings to create a landscape of sounds that unites the properties of both musical and everyday contexts”. -JODA CLÉMENT
Order on-line from Alluvial Recordings $8.00 p.p. in North America, elsewhere $10.00.
REVIEWS:
VITAL WEEKLY 489 | Frans de Waard
Somehow Alluvial knows where to find young and exciting and above all serious composers. Joda Clément (1981, Canada) started out when he was fourteen and ever since he has been working with sound. On this CD he works with instruments (Harmonium, Korg MS-20, PS-3200 & Polysix Synthesizers) as-well as field recordings. Everything goes into the computer and is melted together in a very good, but, I must admit, also a very traditional drone fashion. Things move unearthly deep in the low end, and on top, occasionally, there is something of a melody humming, such as in ‘Song Of Threes’ or traces of a small rhythm in ‘Heliotaxis’. That makes the music of Clément only slightly different from that of Monos, Ora or Mirror (and such like), but it also means he has thought about where to put the icing on the cake. Next to Keith Berry another promising new name in the world of drone music.
Vital Weekly
WIRE 261 November 2005 | Jim Haynes
The Montreal based composer Joda Clément works in a mode familiar to contemporary ambient, minimalist,and drone based artists, as he seeks to bridge natural and synthetic sounds through an atomodpheric wash of blurred details. Within his debut album Movement + Rest, Clément buries field recordings of broken radiators, trains passing in the night and snow falling within a murky grey soundfield built from reverb and the sustained vibrations from a couple of synthesizers. While reverb is often employeed to give the illusion of space within a recording, Clément effectively flattens each and every one of his sounds into a monochromatic smear. Ghostly fragments of a melody, a rainstorm, or a vocal chorale occasionally emerge only to drift back once more into the shadows. While artists such as Jonathan Coleclough and Thomas Koner have succeeded in their mediated marriage of natural and synthetic sounds, Movement + Rest is a tentative first step that with time might develop into something transcendent.
The Wire
Paris Transatlantic December 2005 | Dan Warburton
“All songs by Joda Clément” it says, and that word “songs” is a clue. Strictly speaking none of the six tracks on this album, which were principally sourced in field recordings made in Toronto, Montréal, Paris, Guadalajara and Kabul (this latter a public domain recording), is a song (as in “a brief composition written or adapted for singing”), even if four of them feature additional voice courtesy of Natasha Grace. The second dictionary definition of “song” however does apply “ “a distinctive or characteristic sound made by an animal, such as a bird or an insect““ provided one redefines “animal” as “man in his environment.” “My recordings attempt to blur the distinction between electronic, acoustic and ambient sources,” writes Clément, whose list of instruments used includes harmonium, bells and a whole battery of synthesizers and effects units. “Analog or acoustic instruments are used because of the direct physical process with which they generate sound. I take field recordings from sounds that habitually go unnoticed in the daily environment (airplanes overhead, trains passing in the night, the broken radiator at the end of the hall, falling snow), as well as those which are less accessible for hearing (the abandoned subway tunnels of Toronto, a muffled cab ride through Guadalajara, contact mics on Jacques Cartier Bridge, etc.). I combine nondescript omnipresent noises that surround us with instrumental and vocal recordings to create a landscape of sounds that unites the properties of both musical and everyday contexts.” Those words “blur”, “muffled” and “nondescript” are also significant here “ Clément’s work has more in common with the more meditative / introspective work of Andrew Chalk and Keith Berry than it does with that of Eric La Casa or Michael Résenberg. It’s beautiful and evocative, if a little heavy on the reverb (but I’m not complaining), and I look forward to hearing more of it to come.
Paris Transatlantic
Touching Extremes January 2006 | Massimo Ricci
Can you say “high class in treatment of sorrow”? That’s what came to my mind while listening to the gloomy atmospheres of Joda Clément’s music, which is often comparable to greyish funerals for the light-hearted, slightly dipped in pre-Lustmord sauce. Nevertheless, your approach with this composer should avoid any lateral esoteric thought, since Joda does not indulge in easy emotional tricks; his field recordings are treated and mixed in a rarefaction of drones – multieffect processing and various synths are used extensively – that reveal slow movements of disillusion in the agony of a futureless serenity. Furthermore, Clément works masterfully with time stretching, giving a sense of stasis even to the few moving blocks of his desolated quarters; over there, textural mud evolves into fascinating low-frequency densities, rarely enhanced – better, distracted – by some subtle pulsating sequence or a couple of lamenting synthesizer notes. Keep your eyes open.
Touching Extremes
Le Soliel, January 14, 2006 | David Cantin
In the shadow of the ever popular indie-rock scene, Quebec’s experimental music is sparking up as of late. There’s surely a lot of aventurous sounds to hear from people like Blake Hargreaves, Jacob Chelkowski, Alain Lefebvre or the well-known Alexandre St-Onge. In this experimental field, it’s relevant to point out the wonderful Movement + Rest by newcomer Joda Clément. With the carefull and inventive use of different sound sources, this young composer opens up to a field of possibility rather than a fixed agenda. Often minimal and quiet, these short pieces bring to mind a fragmented chaos. Never boring or too studied, Clément produces assorted and seemingly unrelated brittle, swirling electronic textures. From the human voices on Sacré-Cœur to the abstract melodies of Song of Threes, you have to look forward into this highly noticeable listen. Music in constant progress. HHH1/2 (Translation from the French by Cantin)
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