Soaked

Album review

This collaboration between sound artist Philip Jeck and electronician Jacob Kirkegaard was recorded live at the Moers Festival (Germany) in May 2002. A short set of 35 minutes released hot on the heels of Jeck's solo CD Stoke, Soaked accomplishes little more. Jeck's sound universe is peculiar and characteristic. His antiquated turntables spin voices from the past. Their careful juxtaposition create eery interplays. It is a question of balance between the aleatory evocations of a cadavre exquis and pure sound art. Kirkegaard's electronics disrupt this balance. After a very soft introduction where a turntable spins a hymn under layers of digital electronics, things escalate. Kirkegaard's CD skipping emulates Jeck's techniques, his laptop wizardry tries to frame the less reliable behavior of an army of old turntables. The music reaches a peak in the sixth of seven indexes, almost too loud for what preceded it, and then retracts like the waters at ebb tide for a short catharsis. Soaked is a good piece of improvised sound art and the two protagonists clearly make an effort to listen to each other and make their contributions meet, but in the end it remains an average piece, weaker than Stoke or the Vinyl Coda series.

© François Couture /TiVo