ネイサン・デイヴィス: アースワークス

ネイサン・デイヴィスの「Earthworks」は、ランド・アートや環境活動、ミュージック・コンクレートの要素を融合させたユニークな作品です。デイヴィスは、掘削や水圧破砕、削る、割るといった現代建築の過程から生じる音をオーケストレーションし、人間の声を織り交ぜた音響的タペストリーを作り上げました。この作品はもともとサウンド・インスタレーションとして制作され、フィールド・レコーディングを活用し、屋外の素材そのものをスピーカーや共鳴器として用いたマルチチャンネル作品です。まるで現代の採石場を歩くような神秘的で夢のような音響体験を生み出しています。
ナクソス・ジャパン

Those interested in this 2025 release are recommended to spring for the physical version, which contains not only some cool geological graphics but useful notes by Peter Catapano explaining what the whole thing is about. The music was originally created for a Prague exhibition called "Planetary Home Improvement: From Just-in-time to Geological Time," and one can hardly do better than Catapano in describing it. Earthworks, he writes, is "a 40-minute conceptual and musical love child of land art, environmental activism, and music concrete... an audio tapestry of drilling, fracking, stirring, slurring, scraping, cracking, popping and hammering, with the bright thread of one very intimate human voice woven through it." There are seven movements, namely "Exposition," "Circulation," "Weathering," "Erosion," "Extraction," "Installation," and "Regeneration." An attentive group of students, having had the general concept explained to them, might guess the contents of the individual movements. Except for the fabulous engineering job done by the Sono Luminus label in difficult material, this is not a virtuoso album; percussionist Nathan Davis communicates his content through a series of minimal, slow-moving gestures. That content has background but rather profound overtones of the environmental consequences of humans hive-like activity. Listeners will vary in their reception of this music according to their general attitudes toward the highly experimental, but even those not particularly enthusiastic will have to agree that nobody else has come up with anything quite like this. ~ James Manheim