Transitions

"Drawing from the traditions of musique concrete and late 20th century sound art, David Evans’ new album Transitions is a hypnotic collection of primarily textural work constructed entirely from field recordings. The source for these recordings is the constructed environment and sonically the raw materials would seem to be a reflection of our immediate industrialised past rather than the digital minutiae of the present (and future). Where Transitions excels as a compositional body of work, however, is that these blocks of texture are crafted in such a way that the overall experience feels warmly organic. As a composer and in the context of this work, producer, Evans has chosen to focus each individual track of Transitions to just a small handful of individual source recordings. These recordings are the instrumentation for Transitions and as such the overall aesthetic of the work is intimate and immediate. This intimacy, and the ambiguity of the field recordings, builds a relationship between author and audience whereby the listener inevitably constructs their own imagined sound world. Here perception is reality, as Evans doesn’t try to impose upon us any meta-narrative through the use of descriptive song titles or a didactic title for the work itself. The pulses and musical waves of Transitions will be heard differently by every person that takes the time to sit down and immerse themselves in this work. Ultimately Transitions is a finely crafted piece of contemporary acousmatic composition and production. It allows us to contemplate the constructed environment while asking us to look beyond the steel and concrete to find beauty, subtlety and perhaps even humanity beneath an often brutal facade." — Owen McKern