Joel Stern / Michael Northam - Wormwood

CD from Groundfault

Buy Now $17.00 from Joel Stern and Friends

joel stern and michael northam wormwood Ground Fault series 1 The five wormwood pieces are taken from a single recording session which happened late at night, in a loungeroom borrowed from friends, at petticoat lane, east london, on dec29th 2002. michael had only just arrived fresh/weary from his explorations in malta, joel was preparing to leave london after 3 years and return home to australia. the music, in all its abstraction, reflects this transitory moment of shared sensibility and open exchange between two people heading in opposite directions. "The clicking, clattering, scraping music of sound artists Joel Stern and Michael Northam opens up a subterranean, microscopic world of incredible mystery. Their sounds are by turns metallic, organic, electronic, and simply unidentifiable, and the cumulative effect of all these insectile clicks and theremin-like whines is something akin to the sensation of the first men confronting the massive nuclear-fueled ants from the cult horror classic Them. Northam and Stern's sounds are towering, intimidating—the tense metallic scrapes of the second track are downright terrifying—but there is still something intimate and small-scale in this music that contrasts with its sometimes overwhelming aura. The terror in this recording, more often than not, exists inconspicuously beneath your feet, rather than looming above your head. Within this insular world they've created, Stern and Northam seem completely at home, unperturbed by the disorienting, unsettling noises they're making. Their contributions, needless to say, are inseparable from each other, and the whole has a completely natural and constructed feel, as if each detail is exactly in its proper place. Wormwood is classified in Ground Fault's Series I (of the three divisions within the label's catalogue, this one is reserved for "quiet" and "ambient" music), but that hardly implies that this music could ever exist neutrally in the background. This is an atmosphere record that truly infects and infiltrates the natural ambience of anywhere it happens to be playing. Played quietly enough, Wormwood's sounds hover sinisterly just on the edges of perception, poisonous fumes hanging invisibly (but fatally) in the air. With slightly more volume behind it, however, the album becomes oppressively dense; the music is all sharp edges and tiny charged particles, vibrating, electrified, buzzing with energized static that seems to crackle off the end of each sound pulse. The five tracks all end abruptly, with a momentary pause between each, but the differences between the individual pieces are not so great as to make this a jarring transition. Rather, each track creates the impression of looking at the same scene from a slightly different angle; the busy underfoot chattering is always present, and the droning overtones and periodic interjections of noisy feedback as well, but in each new treatment of this basic material, the mood is subtly altered. On the fourth track, metallic pings form a more coherent rhythmic base than on any of the other tracks. There's a clear sense of forward drive here in the halting, exotic-sounding rhythm, and it nicely complements the buzzing turned-backwards hums, subtle guitar-like tones, and high-pitched whines that make up the track. The intensity of all this is in sharp contrast to the simplicity and general unobtrusiveness of the individual sounds; this is noise that breaks down the listener with subtlety and subversion rather than outright annihilation." Ed Howard - Stylus