Michael Pisaro - Transparent City (Volumes 1 and 2) (EWR 0706/07)
The source materials of these works are field recordings made in the greater Los Angeles area from December 2004 to August 2006. Sine tones and mixing were added to them at Pisaro’s home studio later. Each track consists of ten minutes long material recorded intact at one place with no editing, plus a two-minute silence added at the ending. You are supposed to set the same volume to which you listen to music normally through the whole set.
On Disc 1, daily noises in urban area such as the sounds of cars passing by, the sounds of helicopters and air planes flying over a head, chirps of birds, the low buzzes at a train station, etc. capture your attention at rather low volumes just like you are actually hearing them from a somewhat far distance. Because of the volume restraints, the actual environmental noises around you feel like they're becoming parts of the music, too. This moderate volume, which sounds faint and appearing every now and then, gives a nice sense of space and distance between you and the sounds. The feeling of 'something is going on far off in the distance' gives you a nice and safe feeling, and is a good introduction to bring you into the music naturally, by blending your environmental noises into the music at the same time.
On Disc 2, volumes are set slightly higher than disc 1. Track 5, which seems to be one of the climaxes of the whole set, features roaring heavy noises of air planes passing by overhead with a high volume, slowly creating a mood of disquiet with the deep bass of sine tones. The peaceful wall of distance surrounding you on disc 1 is broken down here, and the sounds and the listeners get much closer to almost coincide, just like you were actually in the scene. In this whole series from Disc 1 to 4, airplane sounds always have great psychological effects on many of the scenes with different volumes and distances.
In spite of the nature of field recordings, the roughness or rawness of real sounds are somewhat not so felt throughout the works. Since they are not edgy sounds that hit right in your face, you can feel a subtle touch of 'stir' or a 'wave' in the sounds even when the volume is rather high. These subtle stirs and waves (that feel like floating in the air) overlap with sine tones that were added delicately to harmonize with the field recording sounds. It creates a sense of drifting in a slightly unrealistic world, and gradually nails your ears to the music with a tranquil power. Pisaro's way of mixing sine tones is incredibly delicate, which reminds me of Japanese calm sensitivity.
Carefully balanced integration of the environmental noises and sine tones made the whole works sound like harmonic music, like breathtakingly well-matched co-performances of the most attentive musicians. The two-minute silence added in the end of each track gives a nice effect as if you were slowly landing down from a slightly unrealistic world to the real world, while your brain is still hearing the afterglow of the sounds.
