Christopher McFall
Four Feels for Fire CD (E42)

Christopher McFall is a Kansas City-based composer. He works with field
recordings and analogue tape, whereby the latter is physically treated prior
to being processed on a computer. Four Feels for Fire was composed
during the summer of 2006, and represents the seemingly endless heat,
grit and turbulence that is typical of that season in the mid-western
United States.

See also EARLabs 3 (E63)

First edition of 300 copies
£8





Mark Pauwen at Earlabs





Four Feels for Fire is forged from the ambience of the industrial
heartlands of Kansas, Missouri. In the sleevenotes, McFall hints at the
“lost functionality” of the area, lending it an almost Ballardian feel of
redundancy and disuse. Using field recordings from this area, McFall
has perhaps unwittingly revitalised the essence of his surroundings,
reconstituting its inner workings to formulate a surreal poetry of
decay. Fusing these works with analogue tape manipulation, [he] has
conjured an alternative world of dense and epic proportions, rangey
tracts that quake and rumble and then slide away, leaving only dust
and mercurial minutiae seething and sizzling like water on hot metal.
Oblique and ‘up close’ scrapings and scratchings once again remind us
of the industrial source material, and the subtle clankings of machinery
become the backdrop for sharply focussed tonality and rich reverberant
sub bass. Absolutely brilliant.

Baz Nichols at White_Line
—

The results are striking — very precise in their purpose, which is to
emulate the ‘endless heat, grit and turbulence’ of a summer in Kansas,
but also highly inventive and obliquely suggestive in their sound
photography. The sense of gradual disintegration, of the materials that
once constituted a city reverting bit by bit to their natural state,
is palpable. Not a lot happens, and when it does so very slowly, yet this
album offers immediate rewards.

Excerpt from a review by David Stubbs in The Wire
—

This must be one of the most impenetrable albums that I’ve heard
recently. After five tries, though, I feel able to pronounce its quality as
superior, yet a proper description still eludes me. In between the various
acknowledgements we find Miguel Tolosa, Jos Smolders and Asher Thal-
Nir. But there is nothing really associable to those artists in terms of
sonority; on a purely conceptual level, a comparison could be made with
Marc Behrens’ recent Architectural commentaries 4&5 on this very label.
Still, Four Feels for Fire is obscure, muddy in a way, analog-sounding,
often subaqueous in its ‘no-light-at-all’ character. It all starts from
processed tapes of course, but what’s on them seem to perennially
revolve around a poetic of no escape, like in a world populated by hunched
entities born to perform their one and only task, lacking any ambition to
look for a better future. An aesthetically uninviting mixture of hissing
interferences, groaning parabolas, urban malaise and gliding sonic slime
that works wonders as a complement to the uncertainties of our own
rationality, a swamp that we can easily fall and drown into without no
one caring, bordering on an engrossing nocturnal landscape which no
human has been able to see until now.

Massimo Ricci at Touching Extremes
—

In his list of ‘thank you’s’, McFall mentions Asher Thal-Nir and that’s not
a bad point of reference. Like Asher, McFall culls essences from his tapes
and tends to isolate quasi-tonal drones from among the sounds over
which other elements, sometimes recognisable, more often not, mingle.
During the third and longest of the five tracks, the mix is especially
mysterious, most of the sounds almost recognisable including perhaps
even flames. He might not achieve quite the poetic level that Olivia Block
manages to do with some regularity, but McFall’s in the same ballpark
here. Four Feels for Fire, calmly laying out its very wide, rich sonic
palette, is a solid addition to the ranks of enhanced soundscapes.

Brian Olewnick at Bagatellen
—

Although it could seem an impossible enterprise to try to retract the initial
‘macroscopic’ aspects from this resultant composition, the attempt is
nonetheless worthwhile. I would in fact posit that such an interpretative
activity — either on a conscious or on an unconscious level — is inevitable
and inescapable for an integral aesthetic apprehension of these works to
occur. In this work a passage is mounted between that unsurpassable
chasm dividing the interior and exterior realities, that in this case form two
indivisible sides of the same coin. Not the chasm itself is the starting point
for the artist’s compositional activity, but I believe that this is really an
attempt at attaining an integrated perspective on the dual nature of the
experiences that are here represented.

...Like [a] revelation, the buildings, sites and events that were recorded,
rematerialise in these sonifications as a passway into a domain where
the previously lifeless space now reappears as infested with the trails
and markings of yet unnamed, undetermined, all-encompassing and all-
enveloping spirit winds that blow here.

Excerpts from a review By Mark Pauwen at Earlabs