Ellen Band is a sound artist and composer who creates performance works, sound installations and sound sculptures.
David Lee Myers is a sound and visual artist producing music based on feedback principles.
David Lee Myers’ Feedback Music has become a concept in it self over time. He has worked with musical feedback principles for many years, in addition to his activities as a visual artist.

Myers has collaborated with a number of sound artists, and I quote the booklet about this collaboration between him and Ellen Band:

I’ve heard many an experimental etude, achieved through home-built or altered equipment. The artistic result has oftentimes been below standards. In fact, at least 90% of what I hear from the so-called experimental or avant-garde scene is gibberish, delivered by un-talented dilettantes who have no idea about composition or concept, and no poetic sense at all, and much of the time I have to restore myself after listening to the shit by spinning Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano Concerto or something through the laser-box...

It has become all too easy to get the machinery – but as I’ve often stated: you don’t write a better novel with a fancier pen. An artist who is worthy of his art can make something interesting with a dry leaf and the rain on the window. An untalented brat can’t make anything worthwhile out of the studios of the Group de Recherches Musicales!

That said, I have to establish that Myers and Band belong at the high-end of the 10 percent that make things worthwhile! This is poetry!

One singular necessary property that a sound artist of today has to integrate with his thinking is discrimination, resulting in omission. You have to strip down the body of sounds you wish to work with to a minimum, and then juggle those sound objects in different lightings, different nuances. If you just amass sounds like Paul Dolden, for example, the result is repulsive, trashy, vomit-inducing. I think Paul Dolden’s latest effort on Empreintes DIGITALes is an example of precisely that untalented, boring machine-fixation that pulls this art into the gutter and hopefully into oblivion and amnesia. I can’t understand why a good label like Empreintes DIGITALes even bother with music like Dolden’s. It has nothing to do with sound art, or art as such, at all. It’s just puberty megalomania on Dolden’s part.

David Lee Myers and Ellen Band, for example, or people like The Great Learning Orchestra in Stockholm or young artists like Andreas Bertilsson or the Australian collective Music of Transparent Means or the multi-media and inter-media group Alice in Wonderband in Serbia, reside at the opposite end of sound art from where Dolden spews his sound masses, in a lucidity and transparency of craftsmanship and poetry, lighting soundspace in diligent shadings and intriguing patterns of minuscule variations, carefully applying their tonal brushes to the canvas, luring the listener into vexatious beauty, venomous pleasure and new discoveries of mind and spirit in enchanted circumstances – and read my lips: this does not have to do with playing loud or low, piercing or soothing: it’s just a matter of artistry or dilettantism. I’ve seen much to often that the Emperor has no clothes, and when I do I say so. On the other hand, when artists are tailored as thoroughly as David Lee Myers and Ellen Band, I can’t but sigh in relief and joy!

The CD booklet contains an interesting conversation between the collaborators. I think Myers hits it right on the nail with this statement, in response to a question from Ellen Band:

I think this reasoning reveals a deeper mystery; a truth about life, about matter and spirit and existence as such, discovering that if you study our circumstances hard and without cultural, religious, philosophical or scientific prejudice, you will find that The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, Rig-Veda and String Theory – and in this case electronic music and nature sounds – can be intertwined: that they ARE intertwined and as exchangeable… as interchangeable with each other… as energy and mass! We are talking about different manifestations of the common basic energy, or if you will, spirit; the core of existence, which Tibetan Buddhists call Rigpa. Therefore our differentiation of all these variations of manifestations are mere semantic, giving us linguistic possibilities, but that’s it! A study into these strands of thought has been conducted by Fritjof Carpa in his book The Tao of Physics (ISBN 0-00-654489-4) (1975). Of course, this insight doesn’t require the studying of books. It’s enough to sit down and think (or bike and think; I like that: bike and think!) – and in this case of Myers and Band it’s just an off-spring of Myers’ words above about the electronic and natural sounds in their music rising into interchangeability.

The first piece on this Myers/Band CD is spread across tracks 1 – 3, entitled Valen Lagoon.

Then opening is bewilderingly similar to David Dunn’s Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond, i.e. piercingly entomological and also nocturnal, the way you might experience the swarming insects on a humid summer’s night when you’ve pulled up the canoe and relax in the grass, getting ready to pitch your tent. It can be overwhelming, giving you a sense of something alien but very, very close: an insight into unheard of worlds right in the vicinity of your face!

Myers and Band deliver a soaring, clicking and nocturnal feeling; a layer of entomological pointillism; an elastic band of sonorities that obscure the night with intense life; a cumbersome vitality of the infinitesimal that all but invades you.

On another level, these initial impressions also invite analogies to François Bayle’s Les Couleurs de la Nuit and Bernard Parmegiani’s Lumière Noire; the latter a part of his La Création du Monde, which also contains a section called Aquatisme – and the composers of these Two Ships pieces agree that their sound world is a marine one. Beautiful!

These hovering, prickly swarms of black dots dance in the manner of gnats on the backdrop of peculiarily modal, dark bounces. In other words; the relentless crackling is counter-pointed by looming thunder (as if through a British oil painting by John Constable from the 19th century)

The music is humid, muggy – with ominous dark cumulus giants towering, about to release ear-shattering thunderclaps any second. I recall those moments when the air is electrically charged and humans feel small on the surface of the land, as the Giants of the Earth exchange blinding light and roaring thunder over your head.

The music has wondrous dynamics and a soaring motion, coming across in innumerable shades of dark hues, from black to dark brown to gray, sucking like wet mud around your rubber boots, throwing flying yester-year leaves in your face, basically overpowering you in a grand display of mudflow sonorities and clod-drift audio.

Circumstances get gradually more slippery, the mud thinning out as water flows in from distant torrents.

The soil starts to bubble and boil, and I hear the percussion of cow-bells up the slope, as bewildered cattle seek refuge in the proximity of humans who look like goblins in the weather, huddling under raincoats and makeshift shelters; shadowy figures looking like vagrant outcasts in Medieval England.

As the tinkling percussion and the sonic wave patterns turn more and more enchanted, moving up into a shaman jet stream of lucid energy, I feel transferred into a beech wood fairytale.
This is where I rest for a while, letting the music perform its wonders, but I am surprised when the surroundings turn urban, ever so slightly, until I recognize the sweeping and soaring sounds as London traffic! Magnificent! Startling!

Second collaborative work is Cape Uiqven, on tracks 4 – 7.

I’m just in from a writing break, having excelled along the asphalt veins of the spruce forests on my Nishiki racing bike for twenty miles; now fresh out of the shower with a cup of black coffee and a generous amount of Glen Clova Scotch Whisky at my disposal – and I can’t but admit enjoying the immediate circumstances, lighting a Nag Champra incense stick, traveling these works of sound art in a physical and spiritual surge!

The gnawing, desperately fierce chewing at wood and electric wires in rubber shielding continues, in the manner of a brewing stew on the stove, water sizzling, nutritious substances moving with the currents of the boiling water.

Glary electronic broadband audio – too embellished to call noise – round up the moment in a circular motion, like were you in the midst of a metal sphere, hovering, while alien parts of your imagination play tricks on you.

High pitch penny-tumbling sonorities provide strange, beehive rhythms, as spurs of escaping steam seep out of the cracks of the present.

This sound world is dense with occurrences, crowded with small Cagean sounds – but still transparent, contoured, like a ultra-sound picture of a pumping heart, or even better; a microscope view of the blood that passes this heart; all the different components of the fluid traveling your anatomy UP CLOSE in this music. Remarkable!

There is also, I believe - or imagine – a watery dropping-into-the-bucket percussive element in here, albeit in a bronze hue, a brass nuance, while some intensely whispering gray sounds open up the conversational gatherings of small ones, perhaps Tove Jansson’s Hattifatteners out of the Finnish Moomin Valley! (Or else just crowds of virulent borderline existences discussing strategy…)

Varying layers of wonderfully ingenious sonorities stretch along the duration! It’s an almost ecstatic journey of discovery to listen.

A whining wind howls ‘round the corner, while repeated slabs of modality sustain the hope of survival like a tolling Heart of Gold; finding a cabin in the mountains of Northern Lapland; yes: the Unna Räitas hut, with only two beds, but shelter from the storm, an iron stove and birch wood. Saved! (Temporarily: Death doth come, with old age, if not before that, haha!) Yes, your heart tolls in the cathedral of your anatomy!

All of a sudden pulsating, criss-crossing shortwave messages encircle the earth in this music, like the thread of a ball of yarn, round and around – like some of the best stuff that I’ve heard from Australian shortwave composer Stephen Gard, whom I’ve paid attention to elsewhere on the Sonoloco site.

Not long after this yarn metaphor, I’m cast into the smelly mangling of a sanitation truck, pressing the remains of society into a cracking, spurting mess of cultural artifacts; the essence of all our activities in the townships across this hurtling globe, always falling, falling, falling through space and time… The music is really hard pressed here, mushy, fruit-drink-like and steaming with rancid stenches!

Organized Law puts its foot down heavily at the outset of track 7, which evolves into an entangled back alley dance of trash cans in the mumbling of law enforcement breaths… Yeah, there is a cartoon layer in here, a Fritz the Cat darnhood and frivolous eagerness for sardine tin cans and horny lady cats on the prowl for sudden erotic somersaults on yesterday’s papers, New York Times makeshift condos!

The last piece is Laventiya Bay, tracks 8 – 12.

Deep, deep, really deep sonorities open this piece, so deep they might blow your speakers if you’re not careful, and with a subwoofer connected you will move loose paraphernalia around the room and even, maybe, let epileptic seizures loose…
This is almost like Alvin Lucier’s state of the art stereo speaker buster Crossings for Small Orchestra with Slow-Sweep Pure Wave Oscillator… but Myers and Band also allow for the treading of organ-like trills inside the dark rumble, like faint memories of stars in a dying person’s thunderous departure from this Bardo of the Living… Magnificent!

As the rumble ceases, a rock desert soundscape open, with innumerable hard reflections of light on the wet rocks and pebbles of glacier streams not far from the Unna Räitas cabin in the picture above. The trickling light of this music tickles your neck and your spine; may even grab you by the neck like a kitten, pulling you up into shaman realms of pure perception in the clarity of thoughtless consciousness. The sound echoes back and forth between the blinding, vibrating tam-tams of vertical mountainsides in the Boreal intensity of Saami thoughtforms.

Golden gamelan pounds inside a sweaty ceremony of bodies out of which spirits have risen for their shaman journey.

Smoke rises out of a cot many miles into amnesia, where memories sleep.