buy.comhttps://www.norentrecords.com/shop/nrr105-sterile-garden-fragmented-warehouse-c28bandcamphttps://norentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/fragmented-warehouse-nrr105listensoundcloudhttps://soundcloud.com/no-rent-records/sterile-garden-excerpt-from-side-a-of-fragmented-warehouseyoutubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1oEPHISoyU'Fragmented Warehouse' is a new exciting adventure of Sterile Garden - the 53rd release of this project.
It is a logical and unpredictable work within the body of work that has his own logic - an unique voice - urgent - convincing - intense - complex - elusive - cinematic - overwhelming - charged - and of a true Subversive Beauty.
The soundworld of Sterile Garden offers a practical tool to alter states of mind. Listening to Sterile Garden enables the listener to break with any form of pattern \ repetition with regard to the relation between man and environment - and enables the listener to look again in a fresh and open way to the world - at the same time it's an initiation into another world, which is in this case and in fact the same - it's stripping the senses and mind of superficial judgements and definitions.
It is s a kind of Ursonate - but it is not the human voice but the voice of the raw materials of the world - the screaming soul of industrial and urban landscapes seen through the dirty and magical filter that is Sterile Garden.
It's bringing the concrete forms and shapes of the world back to an elemental state in order to construct a new intense language out of it, that lays bare unforeseen \ hidden\ potential truths and experiences.
The idea of architecture deconstructed and rearranged - the brutality of its presence - and it's secrets suddenly revealed - the fresh wounds.
The idea of music itself deconstructed and rearranged.
So, Sterile Garden music and anti-music at the same time.
Imagine, is my advice, a presentation of the idea of a large building, for instance as a movie, or better with the use of 12 overhead projectors - a presentation that is an ultra fast sequence show all the stages and aspects of the building: various forms of destruction of the building, the cleaning of it - also in reverse, the undisciplined scaffolding starting their own life and movements, all the people and visitors as ghosts - their activities captured in a lost trance, its denial, the barely audible breaths and the furious storms, all the views and misunderstandings of the atmospheres inside the rooms, broken televisions and radios that transmit new possibilities with their decaying signals, the drawings of architects cut in pieces and re-arranged, all water taps at the same time and unstoppable, the construction of it, the endless rhythms of night and day viewed as stroboscopic fever, the swallowed situations, the silence of the suffering furniture, hysterical timelapses, its absence, dancing layered x-ray photos, poisoned archives and weathered carpets, sudden memories, drunken visionary incidents, the life before its presence, its ruins, the naked electricity, the wallpaper that evokes dreams of the tired workers, all the knowledge and the strange moments.
It is that experience Sterile Garden has to offer - the simultaneity of Richard Huelsenbeck, the Delirium of Rimbaud - Yes! it is a "long, prodigious, and rational disorganization of all the senses" - it transforms the listener into a Visionary.
If art is capable to hold up a mirror to the world, the listener in this case will cut his skin on mirror shards – and in the shards a primal sun and screaming city lights are reflected sharply and violent. This blood will fertilize the soil of the beautiful wasteland that lays in the shadow of false order and illusion of functionality.
Yes, a theatre of cruel sounds - but I would not call it noise, because although it has harsh elements, it is too multidimensional to be placed inside the limited field of 'noise'. Sterile Garden describes its work as a Musique Concrète project - and besides the relation with that tradition, I feel many connections can be made: early Étant Donnés (Marc and Eric Hurtado); Dada visual collage; futurists brutism and Intonarumori; the abandoned factory recordings and use of metal debris by the people of the Industrial Music scene; Psychogeography and Guy Debord and 'The Society of the Spectacle'; the cut-up practises of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin.
Yes, it is the montage that is so important in the work of Sterile Garden, the abrupt changes that are so wonderful and effective. Complete worlds evoked in a small moment, but then suddenly our dream-skin against silent textures and raw surfaces, but then suddenly a percussive pattern recorded in locations in different continents, but then suddenly a cut-up version of the text above on the presentation of the idea of a large building, but then suddenly a cluster of derailed reel-to-reel tapes, but then suddenly a small orchestra of surprised voices of undefined elements caught in a secret intimate encounter. Over the years the fragments became richer in number and quality. The vocabulary keeps growing. The elusiveness is articulated very precise. Each time, the listener can make a different montage of the totality of them and comprehend something unpredictable and unique, that only exists because of Sterile Garden.
So, yes it is highly recommended.
Max Kuiper, The Netherlands
23 april 2019
