SCREE is two heaving slabs of feral tone from HEAVY CLOUD, inspired by the immense natural forces at work on the Cornish coastline. Tidal waves and searing sunlight batter and erode, crack and burn the ever shifting topography of the country’s precarious fringe over 21 minutes of processed heavy electronics. SCREE is a pair of noise ‘landscrapes’ in-spirited by the Cornish coastline, formed over time from eroding loops and voices, processed field recordings and found sounds.
HEAVY CLOUD observes that in geology scree is defined as an accumulation of loose stones or rocky debris lying on a slope or at the base of a hill or cliff. The formation of scree deposits is the result of physical and chemical weathering — erosive processes acting on a rock face, transporting the material downslope. During this process, nothing is physically lost but the terrain is seismically altered. The whole has been dispersed and fractured, forming a multitude of fragments, the body transmitted into a multiplicity, who’s voice echoes across the terrain. Nature’s cyclical renewal compulsively repeats itself, ceaseless but comforting in its presence.
HEAVY CLOUD utilises a range of harsh looping sonics, repeating, abrading and relentlessly channeling the undertow through pummelling drones and screeching noise. SCREE is a sonic interpretation of the environmental and cultural erosion affecting the English landscape. Haunted voices murmur through the processed tones of elemental powers, blown off to sea and spat back against the rocks in a spray of disintegrating spume. Vast swatches of sound change direction and tone abruptly, imitating the shifting weather and tidal patterns of the Cornish coastline. Akin to the undertow of daily thought processes, sounds circle rapidly and relentlessly; some fleeting but others constant and erring.
The two long-form compositions that constitute SCREE take their titles from passages of the Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath:
‘The sun has burned these rocks, and the great continuous ebb and flow of the tide has crumbled the boulders, battered them, worn them down to the smooth sun-scalded stones on the beach which rattle and shift underfoot as one walks over them’.
Plath goes on to observe that ‘a serene sense of the slow inevitability of the gradual changes in the earth’s crust’ comes over her. This feeling, however, is not one of joy or spiritual awakening, but ‘the clean unbroken sense that the rocks, which are nameless, the waves which are nameless, the ragged grass, which is nameless, are all defined momentarily through the consciousness of the being who observes them.’ The landscape constantly renews itself, changing and shifting, often doing so beyond human comprehension. It does so in spite of ceaseless anthropocentric categorisation and destruction, and will continue to do so, long after humankind and its malevolent effects decay and turn to dust. With SCREE, HEAVY CLOUD explores these themes via an approach to noise that aligns itself to the elemental tones of nature, its mineral deposits and pulverising force.
Created and shaped in Cornwall, August 2022. Released by Brachliegen Tapes, January 2023.
David Ciampalini, founder of the Ambient-Noise Collective, bridges musique concrete with psychedelic soundscapes on his debut solo LP. Bandcamp New & Notable Feb 16, 2021
