Esther Venrooy (E30) : Entr’acte

Esther Venrooy
Shift Coordinate Points LP (E30)

Static. Seven short electronic pulses. Then — out of thin air —
a woman's voice dictates: “…eins, zwei, fünf …eins, zwo, fünf…
drei, vier, fünf…” Who are these voices, tirelessly reciting
seemingly random series of numbers, phonems and words?
And who are these cryptic messages meant for? The messages
are irreversibly encrypted, their contents unintelligible to anyone
but the designated receiver. In 1997, British maverick label
Irdial-Discs collected a selection of so-called ‘numbers stations’
or ‘spy stations’ recordings under the title The Conet Project.
This plays like a ‘best of’ of more than 30 years’ worth of secret
radio and contains fragments of American, German, Swedish
and Russian transmissions.

Dutch-born Belgian composer Esther Venrooy was given permission
to work With the material and for the occasion of the celebration
of 75 years of Belgian radio created a highly personal interpretation
of the medium’s secret history. Using manipulated sound and collage
techniques she manages to distill an abstract poetry of sounds and
thereby succeeds in extracting some meaning out of these hermetic
transmissions. The title Shift Coordinate Points refers to an excerpt
from William S. Burroughs’ novel Nova Express. Burroughs utilised
the jargon of secret services and government agencies as a metaphor
for systems of social, intellectual, and sexual control.

First edition of 300 copies.
£10

Frans de Waard at Vital Weekly

Shift Coordinate Points, recorded in 2005, uses as its starting point material documented on the fabled Conet Project (to which Venrooy contributed). As you may recall (I’ve never managed to snag a copy of this difficult to come By item) that venture involved the capture of coded shortwave transmissions of the type immortalized in AMM’s extraordinary concert in London in 1982, when Rowe’s radio picked up the sultry East German voice steadily articulating five-digit numeric sequences, over and over in a mesmeric pattern. ‘Brussel’ begins with a repeated melody, quite a fetching one, played in organ-like tones, under which appears a threatening, low drone as though some exterior force is seeping through the walls. After several minutes, this unsettling atmosphere abruptly halts and the listener is plunged into the world of coded transmissions, staticky swatches of ‘eines’, ‘fünfs’, ‘siebens’, etc. swirled
into a froth of electronica. The section that ends the piece comes close to capturing the eerie, otherworldly aspect heard in the AMM performance, a dire throb underlying a distorted female voice reciting numbers, in English, in sets of four. ‘Arthur’, on the flip side, is a more relaxed collage, the overlaid voices melding with electronics in a rather stately dance, almost as adjacent lines in a fugue, a peaceful resolution. The choice Venrooy makes in weighting the various elements seem quite carefully considered and the resulting balance lifts the music above tangentially similar work as found, say, in early Scanner. This music has heft.

Brian Olewnick at Bagatellen
—

All sounds are carefully chosen and cleverly placed; it’s a sonic canvas
functioning as active complement for reflection in a sort of ‘personal sound
installation’ that works wonders when your anonymous weekend afternoons
are suggesting you to finally move to a new stage in life. The impact of
Shift Coordinate Points is positively striking, reflecting this artist’s humble
intelligence.

Massimo Ricci at Touching Extremes
—

As wholly sinister as the numbers stations are (the protrcated use of the
CIA’s Sexy Lady transmission at the album’s conclusion is especially spooky), Venrooy is at her best when she alludes to a technological disquiet through
the electrical discharges and sinusoidal hums endemic to shortwave itself.

Jim Haynes in The Wire
—

The two minimal pieces that make up Shift Coordinate Points outline a
specific, isolated space that draws the listener into a deeply frozen realm
of static, recitation, channel manipulation, low-end pulse, and wide open
contained space. Once [side A] is completed, the words of the radio
transmissions take on an almost desperate quality, as if they couldn’t come
out quickly enough; where “delta, four” sounds like a love letter never sent.
[Side B] starts out with a gorgeously decaying tone poem that crumbles
into more recitation, manipulated to confuse and then followed with drones
enough to lull tankers to sleep in the dead middle of the sea.

Doug Mosurock at Dusted