Drew Mulholland - A Haunting Strip Of Marshland: Ness LP

Drew Mulholland knows how to listen to a place. How to lay ears to a landscape and catch the voices and utterances that surface into the skull. But fidelity is not his aim here ÐÐand nor should it be with such a deceiving, treacherous site as The Ness. The tracks you hear are, in their distortions and manipulations, truer to The Ness' unsettlements and resonances than any others I know. They hover somewhere between field-recording and haunting. Acoustic elements have been worked over until they are scarcely recognisable, surviving scantly as hyper-mutated catalysts. Mulholland even used the place itself as the distortive force; he gathered lichen species found on The Ness, ground them nearly into dust, glued the resulting powder onto a length of cassette tape, played and recorded the lichened tape, then stretched the recording to ten times its original length Ð before splicing it and adding reverb and echo. The resulting tracks are fabulously unfaithful to their origins on the untrue island.