Pond (review)

It takes some time before the secrets of this CD are revealed, unless of course one reads the liner notes first. But with nothing but the title as a guide, one wonders whether this is purely electronically generated sound imitating life or vice versa. After a while, one realizes that the hisses, rhythms and barks are just a little bit too lifelike to be artificial and the curious atmosphere a little too objective—almost expressionless—to be a product of the imagination. If I had known Tod Dockstader, I might not have had a doubt about what was happening here, but I confess I had to look him up; <dockstader.info/index.php> was a good starting point, and reading the accompanying notes was helpful, too, of course.

It so happens that Dockstader (b. 1932) is a pioneer in electronic music and musique concrète, whose works from the 1960s, such as Quater-mass and Apocalypse, have been recently rediscovered. Trained as a painter and filmmaker, he moved to Hollywood and produced sound for films, later working on educational video projects. Being a self-taught sound producer, he ran out of funding and resources to continue making his music, and he disappeared from the recording stage.

David Lee Myers, on the other hand, made his name in the 1980s under the name Arcane Device. His tools were feedback, synthesizers and computers, rather than Dockstader's recordings and overheated tape recorders, but the younger man managed to convince his friend to try the newer devices. Dockstader seems to have been a quick study. He soon "realized that many of the old principles—slowing, speeding, pitch-change, reversal—were the same—but with much more control and better sound. And no tape hiss. Because it was faster and I could keep my belief in what I was doing, more fun."

The two of them started gathering frog and toad calls, recording around ponds late into the night, and took that material into the studio, where the two men subjected it to every transformation imaginable without ever losing a trace of its origin. What the artists did with their source material was not haphazard, though. Being professional "listeners," they wanted to come up with a final result that could attract and keep the lay listener's attention. So they augmented and interpreted the sounds they had collected, using them to recreate the environment of a pond, as if projecting their internal perception back over the water and among the reeds. Art and life are thus blended into a new, richer acoustic experience.