By: Will Pinfold
Causings | bandcamp |
Subtitled ‘quiet improvisations from New York City’, 4-Hour Body is a series of five abstract, barely (indeed, only occasionally) musical improvisations by Causings, a trio consisting of Derek Baron, Sandy Gordon and Adam Gundersheimer, along with various collaborators, but the sounds they make could just as easily be the work of one person, or one hundred.
A fairly large part of the running time of the nameless pieces that make up 4-Hour Body consists of sounds that are reminiscent of the between-song pauses at a band’s home rehearsal; shifting, creaking and rustling noises, the hum and buzz of amplifiers, the odd plink and twang of a guitar or similar instrument, assorted thuddings, snatches of not-quite-audible conversation and what might be a television. Sometimes the voices are distorted, but never emotionally intense or harsh. In fact, even in their most dramatic moments, Causings make only a malice-free rumbling noise something like the intros to Sonic Youth’s earliest non-representational sound experiments, or an artist like The Rita without the thunderous layers of feedback/static.
4-Hour Body’s notes state that it was ‘recorded at home in Queens, NY’, which perhaps accounts for the somehow domestic feeling of quiet intimacy that emanates from the album when listened to without other distractions. Indeed, taken as a whole, there is an almost imperceptible beauty in 4-Hour Body that comes from forcing the listener to focus on and acknowledge the kind of mundane, ungraspable sounds that form the almost-imperceptible background to so much of everyday life. Truly ambient in its inclusiveness, 4-Hour Body is as much about what happens when musicians don’t play as when they do, and the result is as at times as strangely poignant and enigmatic as a recently-vacated room.
As with a lot of improvisational art, the featureless, random nature of much of the album gives those moments when something actually happens – such as the almost-musical changes of pitch in the humming noises on track 5 – a feeling of significance, even if what the listener is left with is essentially a big question mark.
Quiet experimental noise is perhaps the hardest of all music to define (let alone to market) and seems to attract accusations of pretentiousness far more than its harsh cousin, but one of the strengths of Causings is that they make no claims whatsoever for their work; “They build portraits and landscapes from odds and ends in the home and garden”. That much is undeniable, all else is speculation and interpretation.
