An Idea Of North/Learning To Walk
Mark Harris
n5MD Records.
SCQ Rating: 75%
Whatever freedom
lies at the heart of instrumental music, be it post-rock’s life-affirming
crescendos or electronic music’s textural abyss, it’s magnified to the ethers
when we’re dealing with field-recordings. To be a listener in the absence of
voice – okay. But separated from the very intricacies of traditional or
avant-garde composition – the instruments, the progressions – well, that’s a
whole new world of freedom.
If all of this “absence”
talk sounds impossible to navigate, rest easy: An Idea Of North/Learning To
Walk notes its own intangible compass in the title. Audio/visual artist Mark
Harris furthermore gives the listener direction at the onset with “Softly Lies Sleeping”,
with natural sounds of distant waves, bird calls and rustling trees – or is
that rain upon a roof? In either case, Harris’ establishing shot encompasses a
smattering of field recordings that are highly suggestive and well integrated.
A sneaky choral of synth curls around the track’s property, merging with the
liquid cascade and transforming into the ambient “In Slow Motion She Falls”. An
immaculately clean album, An Idea Of North/Learning To Walk doesn’t throw many
anchors for listeners to depend on; its ample negative space somehow sounds
bright and tracks slide gracefully into one another like the currents of a
stream. So when a rare and overt melody constructs itself amid the title
track’s Beaches and Canyons-indebted standstill, it transfixes and briefly
restricts the listener’s sedated daydreaming.
It’s easy to lose
concentration and allow a sound-design record like An Idea Of North/Learning To
Walk to just thrive along the walls of one’s room. As much a soundtrack for existing
as a mental journey in our own hands, Harris’ work contains its share of themes
and percolating ideas just waiting to be uncovered and made personal.
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