Great singers are often as much great microphone artists as they are voice artists. Think of Frank Sinatra or Al Bowlly. The force, the affect of their performances, in significant part, comes from the way they use the mic. I heard an offhand comment from the singer-composer Jennifer Walshe recently where she happened to mention that she always sings into a microphone (far from a given in concert hall music). Then just last week, watching her perform with all manner of strange objects and instruments for her residency at Cafe Oto, I realised here was someone who could put anything in front of a microphone and make it sound good. A great mic artist.
There isn’t really much voice on Mess (Akt IV). There is air and breath and all sorts of weird kind of grunting, panting, slobbering sounds, but no vowels, no pitch, no vibrating vocal cords. And yet like Al Bowlly singing ‘Hang out the Stars in Indiana’, it is very much a record about the close proximity of a microphone – or rather, several unique, carefully selected microphones – and a mouth.
Lorenzo Abattoir is a sound artist from Torino in Italy who has spent the past couple of years engaged in an intense study of what he refers to as “three key concepts for the artist: breathing, amplification, and movement” (as per the album’s inner sleeve). This is the fourth “act” of that study, which began with Flag Day Recordings’ Disincarnazione in 2023. From the very beginning, it is a seriously intense listen. The word “immersive” gets bandied about a lot in music writing these days, but Mess (Akt IV) is a positively engulfing experience. Which is to say that putting it on feels rather a lot like being eaten.
In the past, I have spent hours meticulously editing out unwelcome mouth sounds from vocal takes. Searching through the track window on Logic to find that little gasp, the brief grunt, a momentary lip smack. Cut either side. Snip it away. Carefully crossfade to smooth over the gap. Abattoir here might have been digging through my discards bin and, like some sonic womble “making good use of the things that the everyday folk leave behind”, he has now assembled this feral collage, this tender noise music, this stark Deleuzian metamorphosis.
Mess (Akt IV) does not really sound quite like anything else. It may share some DNA with the lowercase sounds of Steve Roden and Jeph Jerman, with the gobby free improv vocals of Phil Minton and Dylan Nyoukis, even with the whispering, shuffling soundtrack to Kyle Edward Ball’s weird (2022) horror film Skinamarink, but it is also, in many significant and immediately apparent ways, very much not like any of these things. One day, maybe filmmakers will use this record as a reference point when putting the sound together for the transformation scene in their new werewolf picture. Until then, this will be an album that takes pride of place amongst the freakiest cuts in my record collection, somewhere between the Los Angeles Free Music Society and that album I bought once of aberrant heartbeats intended for the training of cardiologists. Abattoir has turned himself inside out for this record. I feel thoroughly digested. A great mic artist.
