Pfalz II | tbc
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Nature And Organisation
When we think about nature, we think mostly in opposition to culture. But I think there is no opposition. Nature is culture and can be redicovered as new nature. This is a growing process of making.
If you look at nature, you always see the cultra stanza who made it. Why not change the stanza? And see nature as a cultural value that construct herself. This life which not humancentric is. It a part of it, but isolated. Naturalness is always the culture value of nature and a process of human thinking and doing.
But we would not see that centric. We meet a wide field of many forms and states which never before concepted. That our mission.
tbc 2008
Pfalz II
excerpt:
1 Track (28′37“)
CD-R (50 copies)
Field Recording Series by Gruenrekorder
Gruenrekorder / Germany / 2008 / Gr 054 / LC 09488
Reviews
01 Frans de Waard | VITAL WEEKLY
Thomas Beck has been around for a long time. I never knew he was behind H64, which I once called the loudest in Europe. He’s also responsible for the Wachsender Prozess label, Odradek magazine and his own radio programm. These days his solo project is called TBC and as such he has done already a couple of releases. For Gruenrekorder he made a work that falls in the section of field recordings (the label works with various categories). We hear TBC mostly dealing with wind sounds, out there in North Germany’s cold forest in one piece that lasts about thirty minutes or a bit less. Cleverly divided into smaller blocks with silence in between, this is almost like a Lopez like work and certainly the best work I ever heard coming out of his hands. Away is the roughness of the electro-acoustics of before and replaced by a subtle piece of field recordings most easy to capture event: wind. Very nice indeed.
02 Andrew Quitter | Heathen Harvest
Genre: Ambient Field Recordings / Phonography
This has been somewhat of a hard review to get started on in a few different ways. The first being the very little info available about the artist himself online. The best I can come up with is that this is the project of Thomas Best, who began his musical career in the early eighties with the harsher, cut-up styled project H 6 4, before discovering phonography (the art of taking field recordings, or "audio snapshots") and changing his name to TBC in 1991. Besides his somewhat prolific output under the new name, he has also been involved with a slew of side projects, collaborations, and the running of several labels over the years.
The second and most obvious reason is the subtlety of the recordings on this disc it‘s self. This is not a disc you can just put on, crank up, and get a good feel for. It has many underlying sounds that would go completely unnoticed without the right listening environment. While I had an idea of this going into it, it took a few days for me to find the time to create that "perfect" setting to soak all of the sounds in. I decided first to listen to it with all of the windows shut, the cats put out, my wife at work, and the stereo loud. It needed to be quiet so that I could hear only the sounds coming out of the speakers, and not all of the noise that fills my home, living right in the middle of the city. The second listen was on headphones, as I lie in bed in that half awake, half asleep state that is always the best way to listen to any record. While maybe I’m just really picky about the way I listen to music, I really admire the work of field recordist for exactly this reason. They make albums that require a deeper listening, and if given the right settings they can take you to a place you’ve never been before.
The disc starts off with some gentle rumbling. The sounds of wind blowing, leaves and sticks crunching under foot, but mostly just the wind. There are long stretch’s of silence in between the more ear-catching sounds, with just the faintest hints of life during the pauses. These pauses somewhat annoyed me on the stereo, but made for a very relaxing listen on the headphones. At the ten minute mark you hear the sound of a plane taking off far in the distance, before it disappears and is on it’s way to whatever destination it may have had on this particular day. Reaching around the 15 minute mark we get the most movement of the whole album. Dried leaves are being crunched under foot, while some kind of weird sawing sound goes on. The wind blows hard in the background, sounding the way wind only sounds when it’s extremely cold, turning your cheeks red. Twigs are snapped, and maybe a fire is started to fend off the weather? Towards the end of the album, our host seems to be making his way home, crunching through the rocks, until suddenly the disc stops and you’re back in your own world once again.
As you might have guessed the packaging is very minimal on this release. A pro-pressed white on white CD-R , in a nicely printed, what I’m guessing is hand assembled little sleeve, with the barest info given, giving you the name of the artist, album, record label, and that’s it. What more do you really need though? This may not be an album I listen to a large number of times, but it’s definitely A great record to pop on your headphones, and be taken away to another place whenever you feel the need.