Ball of Wax 51 Songs: Russell Duke – “Sonic Carpentry”

“Sonic Carpentry” is a terrific descriptor for a lot of what we makers of recorded music do, whether we’re working with the raw materials of instruments and voice or field recordings from a roundabout in Ho Chi Minh City. We take raw materials, chop them up, refine them, move them around, fit them together just so. Some, of course, go a bit farther with their carpentry than others. Russell Duke‘s work veers pretty far from the traditionally musical, but there’s still music to it, along with so much else. Duke is fascinated with noise and distortion, with how it affects communication and creates new sounds. This piece starts with the aforementioned roundabout source material and “subverts it via a range of analogue and digital modulation” – i.e. takes every tool in the wood shop (and a few more besides) to it. The resulting piece (especially listened to on headphones, which is really the ideal setting for most of the tracks in this collection) transports the listener, if not to Vietnam, then to a strange new world of Duke’s making. Occasional sounds from the “real world” slip through to remind us of where we came from, but for the most part, Duke has succeeded in utterly transforming his source material. The last third of the piece begins to start downright musical as a dark, murky beat sneaks in, and haunting chords materialize, swelling to a blissfully noisy climax that slowly retracts and tapers off to a whooshing loop of bumps and gasps and traffic noise. A highly successful exercise in sonic carpentry indeed.