The artist Eden Box’s 1981 oil painting Stranger on the Shore depicts an odd pastoral. A woman sits on a beach, illuminated by a crescent moon. In the background an ominous figure dressed in black steps into the water. Most disquieting are the cat and dog who accompany the woman and casually break the fourth wall. While she looks at them, they stare at us, the viewers. Box captures the specific, quizzical gaze animals have when faced with the unfamiliar. In doing so the picture suggests, perhaps, that the strangest thing about this scene is us observing it.
Box, real name Eden Fleming, travelled the world, and this worldliness is reflected in her paintings. Connecting the colourful settings are animals, often depicted where you wouldn’t expect to notice them – a tiger and seal chilling outside the gates of heaven in ‘The Expulsion’, for instance.
Eden Box is the name of Neil Luck’s new album, co-published with a book called Sensible Activities. Like Box’s paintings, book and record toy with perspectives, nature and settings. Opener ‘For the Mother/Cherry Tree Carol’ begins with a folk dance on acoustic guitar. What’s initially traditional and jaunty becomes abstract and sombre. Groaning vocals, whistles avian and human alongside clanging tones see two pastorals, one nocturnal, one diurnal, fuse.
The album, built from performances by Luck and a host of collaborators, largely performed outside and impromptu, mostly recorded on the edge of a forest in southern Germany, revels in ambiguous angles on nature-culture overlaps. The squeaks, screams and feral glissandi on ‘Leaf Catalogue’ give the impression you’re hearing an unspecified non-human creature (somewhere between a horse and a rodent) in distress. It’s actually a group leaf blowing exercise, a momentary break as a performer lets out a gasp for air making clear no animals were suffering. ‘Pith’ and ‘Organic Techno’ drop in propulsive beats from soggy, squelchy, hoofed sources to create, well, organic techno. There’s hints of Matmos in these groove-oriented assemblages of concrete sounds, but Luck’s beats are more clip-clopping and trotting than computer sequenced.
These peculiar sonic environments are explained in the accompanying book. In it, Luck presents instructions for sonic rituals to be performed in specific surroundings: simulate a dub remix of a road or river by cupping your hands over your ears. Use your fingers and eyelids to replicate noise cancellation. Sonically reminiscent of the vernacular-electronic-organic hybrids created by Italian duo Rosso Polare, Eden Box embodies a playful way of interacting with what’s around. It’s so successful because it gleefully embraces a sense that experiencing our environment entails aiming at a moving target from an unstable platform. On Eden Box, the whole world is a curious stranger.
