The Fleeting Gleaned continues a unique tradition that blends the process of field recording with musical composition and takes an additional step forward, encouraging the listener to do the same.
The two-composition work from the Dublin-based Abaqa Kahns offers a cinematic and meditative experience developed with sounds the artist has sourced from rather conventional origins — their childhood home.
Released through Bandcamp on Jan. 16, it is an undertaking that follows the traditions of musique concrète, a form of music composition that uses recorded sounds as raw material and then transforms the primary source through manipulation to effectively create a sound collage. It is a tradition that has its origins in the 1940s and is commonly associated with the French composer and theorist Pierre Schaeffer.
And following this process, the sounds that comprise The Fleeting Gleaned have taken on an entirely new and meditative character from their origin.
“I like to collect field recordings like photographs,” the artist told Sound Dissection. “As moments are fleeting and anything but concrete, I thought it would be fun to see how far I could push the recordings to the musique side of musique concrète.”
“Azera Scented Mornings,” the opening piece of the release, is a collection of sounds procured from the cooking of breakfast while on a visit to the home still inhabited by the artist’s father. As a piece of composed music, it is very percussive, taking on the characteristics of a drum circle with a resonant metallic texture.
“My brother was making breakfast, and when he hit the kettle, it made an interesting sound, so I sampled it along with the sounds of the breakfast frying,” the artist said.
A layer of texture — the sound of something frying in a skillet — permeates throughout the work and offers a meditative calling effect. That base sound is then surrounded by percussive tones that transform throughout the duration of the piece.
Then, as it progresses, a fully formed melody takes shape. It stands as a milestone, allowing the listener to follow and map out the relatively traditional song structure.
At just over six minutes, “Azera Scented Mornings” does not overstay its welcome. The piece keeps the mind wondering and anticipating what unique texture might come next. As it comes to an end, the listener feels compelled to play it back from the beginning just to decipher more of the many unique tones it presents.
The rhythmic nature of the piece allows it to take on the characteristics of meditation or healing music. It gives the mind a space to wander within an unfamiliar structure. It is an opportunity to explore an immensely detailed landscape painted by the artist’s ability to transform the radically nonmusical prototype.
It is a space that not only the listener enters, but its author.
“The first field recording, made from the sound of the kettle and breakfast, transported me to lazy Sunday lie-ins with my girlfriend, and coffees in bed,” the artist said. “That’s where the title ‘Azera Scented Mornings’ came from, Azera being both a brand of coffee and, in Arabic, meaning cheeks. It is also a feminine name associated with beauty. In Persian, it can mean dawn or fire. So it became somewhat multilayered.”
The project’s second work, “And The Black Rain Fell,” carries with it a sense of weightlessness before a drum beat begins to ground it.
It has a heavily grounded and rhythmic personality.
The piece is created from a collection of sounds gathered while working in the garden of the artist’s childhood home: a spade hitting the hard soil and birds chirping away in the distance.
As the artist states, it is “the sound of a spade in my childhood garden being the seed from which the mind wandered. The playful sound of metal, dark clouds bearing in.”
It is so transformed from its origin that what began as the sound of hard work carries with it a chorus and gentle chimes.
Like the prior piece, the composition encourages the mind to wander far beyond the confines from which they were gathered, acting as a meditative exercise for the listener.
Both “Azera Scented Mornings” and “And The Black Rain Fell” carry with them a heavily organic texture. Although heavily modified, they have a sense of grounding in reality that some electronic musical instruments do not.
In turn,The Fleeting Gleaned bears with it a tangibility and physicality that feels rather uncommon and individual in an era when virtually anyone with a personal computer, or even a personal device, has access to an endless library of simulated instruments.
Under these conditions, the project not only challenges the conventions of traditional composition but also encourages a dialogue regarding the subject of meaning. It investigates where creator and listener both find and build meaning in a musical endeavor.
In a final act of democratic creativity, the artist has included the original recordings for all to use as inspiration and a basis for their own creative endeavors.
They state: “I thought it would be interesting to also put the samples up and offer them for others to imagine their own stories and see what memories the sounds may trigger for them.”
