Day For Night
(Paradigm Discs - PD14) CD $12.00
The foundation of this work consists of location recordings layered with the live or recycled sounds of Eastley's kinetic sculpture, delicate and elegant kinetic sound devices, either motor driven or animated by environmental forces like the wind, streams or the sea. "A brilliant tape-collage suite," says our friend Ed Pinsent from The Sound Collector. " 'Peep Show' mixes a firework display, a marching band, insects buzzing and snatches and samples of music and sound. 'Zero Day to Zero Night' has a bonfire, birdsong and a wild dog.... Peter Cusack is a veteran improviser on stringed instruments, including the guitar and bouzouki, both of which he plays here.... 'Cast' [is] a documentary tape from the factory floor with added layers of droning music. Most sublimely ... 'Arc Light' ... presumably features the electroacoustic monochord - without doubt a device of Eastley manufacture.... 'Shade 1' and 'Shade 2' ... are the most haunting...; both suggest stations on a surreal train-journey worthy of De Chirico."
Installation Recordings (1973 - 2008)
(Paradigm Discs - PD26) 2xCD $24.00
What is essentially a retrospective of Eastley’s installation work updates and adds many new examples to New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments (split LP with David Toop, Obscure Records 1975). Of the 35 tracks on this, Eastley’s first solo CD, only the last two have guests or “playing” (the most virtuosic moment being George Lewis wailing on a grass blade). All the other pieces are either powered by the natural forces of wind and water, or else motor-driven gallery installations. The ethereal sounds of the Aoelian harps, the haunting Aeolian flutes, and the violent tension of his aerophone installations are hallmark Eastley sounds, which sit, with many others, amid a wide range of acoustic settings, from windy hill tops to quiet brooks, residential street scenes to coastal shores. The range of indoor recordings is no less varied: a rich variety of acoustics and gallery spaces from tiny micro sounds to large-scale amplification. Wood, metal and stone are brought to life with electricity. Although there are many photos in the 20-page booklet, much is left to the imagination; such limited access to the visual pulls the focus toward the musicality of the sounds themselves, reinforced by slow crossfades from indoors to outdoors, forming a series of suites. The recordings mostly date from the mid-’70s, but there are pieces from later decades. Nearly everything was recorded either to Revox or Uher and occasionally to cassette, using what microphones were available at the time. Recent recordings are digital. The varying quality of the recording set-ups across this double-CD adds yet another dimension to the shifting sound fabric of the anthology.