four towers and a bridge - emmanuel mieville (Tape)

With 'four towers and a bridge', composer and field recordist, Emmanuel Mieville shares musique concrète spells and sonic bridgings of machinery acoustics.

In the span of four tracks, electroacoustic sculptings and dronesque gestures intersect to form a seemingly continuous investigation of the mechanisms of passage. The album toys with sounds recorded in, on, and around technologies of crossing; from the Ponte Eiffel bridge in Viana do Castelo (Portugal) to the elevator and automated railway system of the BnF (the national library of France) in Paris. The latter, known as the TAD, is a hidden transportation apparatus made of suspended cases that move books and documents from the BnF’s stocking areas to its lecture rooms. To each track its means of traversing and its subjects: a bridge and its vehicles, an elevator and its humans, the TAD and its printed matter, a precipitation and its water. These transits resonate and Mieville listens but also answers. Their rhythms, hums, vibrations, and squeaks intertwine and, at times, are accompanied by the sustained murmurs of a stringed and motorized hurdy-gurdy instrument that gives hints of a recontextualized French folk music. Surprisingly, the album concludes with an opening on a rural environment where the...  more