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LP
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DLC 015LP
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De La Catessen offers the first re-release in over 40 years of the long-lost soundscape composition Sounds Like Work, initially privately released on cassette in 1978, by South Australian composer and scholar, Chester Schultz. Drawing from material recorded in late 1976 in the workplaces of members of the Maylands Church of Christ congregation, subsequently edited at the electronic music studio of Adelaide University in early 1978, Sounds Like Work has an oddly contemporary cast, given both the sophistication and intelligence of its composition, and the ever-relevant address of the meanings of the "working environment" that Schultz explores here. Doing this via sound, however, reveals plenty of previously unnoticed, or under-recognized, things about peoples' lives at work. Schultz's composition is refreshingly free of direct polemical or political intervention, though there is a subtle undercurrent of critique of the way the workplace makes us both suffer, and conform to expectation. Schultz's questions about the workplace -- what it does to the worker; the ways the worker tries to wrest control of the working day; work's alignment, or not, with our inner private lives and beliefs -- are poetically explored through lyrical editing, curious juxtaposition, and an unerring ability to know when to 'leave things be.' There's also an understanding here that the socio-cultural context of sound has both its specificities and its generalities. The voices heard here could be from nowhere other than Australia, yet what they speak of, and the everyday sounds they're surrounded by, could come from most anywhere. Schultz's approach to the use and understanding of sound via the soundscape came predominantly from reading and listening to R. Murray Schafer, and you can certainly hear the implications of Schafer's thinking in Sounds Like Work. It also recalls other, loosely analogous compositions, like Luc Ferrari's acousmatic tour de force, Presque Rien. Most of all, though, Sounds Like Work is a startling composition, one which subtly redraws the histories listeners long been told about Antipodean avant-garde sound.
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CD
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DLC 008CD
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The first widely available edition of this singular, long-form composition, Within Our Reach: A Symphony Of The Port River: Soundscapes, by Port Adelaide, Australia-based pianist, composer, writer and researcher Chester Schultz. Originally self-released by Schultz in 1996, on his own Waterhole imprint, Within Our Reach was initially distributed free as a community resource, and not available for sale. De La Catessen's reissue is an invaluable contribution to developing histories of music and composition from Adelaide. It also offers the chance for germane reflection on the implications of late capitalism, gentrification, and "development" for both landscape and inhabitants. For Within Our Reach, Schultz has mapped out, via field recordings, an intricate, generous composition that documents the sounds of the Port River tidal inlet area of the greater Adelaide city. The recordings cover the period between 1989 to 1995, during which time the last of the industries based on the banks of the Port's higher land closed; there's something of a ghosted psychogeography of industry past during parts of Within Our Reach, with Schultz's evocative use of field recordings offering the listener clues as to the ongoing spatial rearrangement of the Port River area. Throughout Within Our Reach, you hear the interaction of multiple phenomena. The cawing and singing of birds, individual and en masse, broadcasts out over the submerged drone that modern transport "gifts" to the urban soundscape; for example, a rambling human voice, singing the traditional song "Down By The Riverside", is tangled up in the hum and purr of traffic, and the call of the seagull. Water and wind interact; the wind plays the guitar strings like an Aeolian harp; on "Hulks", Schultz and friends 'play' the debris of the mudflats, tapping on rusty bolts and rotting wood; a scherzo of people, wandering through the everyday, leads into a documentation of families gathered on the mudflats, playing guitar, recorder and clarinets, humming along idly; story fragments drift by, from Schultz and others. The delicate balancing act undertaken here, between the sounds of the natural world, the intrusions of the industrial world, and the constant negotiations of the people and animals that live within, and around, these spaces, is testament to Schultz's sensitive ear and careful, considered composition. Dedicated to theologian social critic Jacques Ellul, composer and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen, soundscape composer R. Murray Schafer, and the residents of Port Adelaide, Within Our Reach is a deeply moving document of the transformation of public space, and a profound, genuinely critical "music of place".
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