Brief #1: Liz Helman's The Colour of Water (Flaming Pines)

Permanent marks of ephemeral soundscapes hide in the music of the London based artist

Today more than ever, the music world seems to be plagued by a severe case of FOMO. Even its off-the-grid, experimental nooks are not immune as a constant stream of new music renders any song or record older than a few weeks obsolete. The rhythm of releases and coverage is unstoppable and must be obeyed, lest you fall behind. One of Research Music's raisons d'etre is thus the desire to push back against this narrative, giving space to exceptional music regardless of when it was created. And what better place to start than with an album on sound artist Kate Carr’s label Flaming Pines released ages ago, in November 2023. 

While the gamut of music carried by the London based imprint is wide and varied, from raw field recordings to synthetic ambient explorations, there is a sense of slow drift and permanence suffusing all their releases, a timelessness embodied in expressions such as the sounds of the city that hold together Liz Helman’s The Colour Of Water.

The recordings of common metropolitan noises – hurried chatter, confused animal calls, revving motors, and other mundane minutiae – that the multi-disciplinary artist made during her walks through London are utterly dynamic yet entirely unchanging and familiar, as if you could venture down those same paths and capture those same sonic objects today and tomorrow as you did yesterday.

Similar to a recent Instagram reel that marvelled at the “sickest noise set” that a pair of generators were producing at Atlanta’s Grant Park, Helman has a keen ear for discovering engaging threads in an urban tapestry of sounds we usually tend to take for granted and filter out. Each of the seven cuts on her album uses field recordings as stems, then grows them into something alien, something more, by manipulating them with an arsenal of simple but compelling electronic effects.

On the desolate “Where The Circle Meets The Square”, the ubiquitous shapes of urban background hum become saturated, voluminous drones. “Those Forming Another” and “Footprints + Feathers” turn the repeating, restless rise and fall of machinery and footsteps into pockets of hypnotic polyrhythms. Meanwhile, a corner preacher’s fervent proclamations serve as the basis for the harrowing, martial industrial evoking effigies of “Urban Messiah (Time Has Told)”. In moments like these, the record offers a transporting but also transformative experience, inviting us to revisit and rethink the sounds of our surroundings. There might still be magic hiding out there.