Artist: Joel Stern & Michael Northam Title: "Wormwood" Catalog #: GF027 Series: I Total Time: 51'59" Release Date: January 6, 2004

Wormwood

01: untitled
02: untitled
03: untitled
04: untitled
05: untitled

The first 50 copies of "Wormwood" came with a bonus 3" CDr by MNortham entitled "Gebel (Excerpt)". These were sold out in 6 days.

reviews

The five wormwood pieces are taken from a single recording session which happened late at night, in a loungeroom borrowed from friends, at petticoat lane, east london, on dec29th 2002. michael had only just arrived fresh/weary from his explorations in malta, joel was preparing to leave london after 3 years and return home to australia. the music, in all its abstraction, reflects this transitory moment of shared sensibility and open exchange between two people heading in opposite directions.

+found objects, prepared instruments, electronics, feedback systems, environmental recordings+

Joel Stern

Joel is a sound artist exploring electroacoustic approaches to composed and freely improvised music. He performs using field recordings, contact microphones, found objects, digital processing techniques and simple feedback systems, producing works which move between richly textural surface noise, investigations of acoustic space, and minute gestural detail. Joel has performed and produced work for galleries, theatres, pubs, and squatted indian restaurants throughout Australia and Europe and has released music on labels including Impermanent, TwoThousandAnd, Touch, Groundfault and Paradisc. He has collaborated with many artists including Anthony Guerra, Matt Davis, Paul Hood, Oren Ambarchi, Phil Samartzis, Jim Denley, Rhodri Davies, Robbie Avanaim, Tony Buck and Mattin.

Michael Northam

A self proclaimed sound 'composter', Michael's works to redirecting the experience, observation, and discovery of unique organic and inorganically driven sound phenomena towards their open ended application in what he calls 'intuitive assemblage'. Recordings of forgotten places to the midst of massive demonstrations, the manipulation of discarded objects to the articulate drones of harmonic wires of traditional instruments, his sound work spans the chasms between tonal and atonal musics and acknowledges neither in order to create a suspended space of viewing our condition embedded in stochastic fields of constant change. He has presented sound works extensively throughout Europe and North America and has over the past 12 years scattered published works produced from four continents. He is currently helping to develop studio facilities and record label concerning new sound works, sound sculpture and the documentation of sound phenomena in western Switzerland.

REVIEWS

• "Utah-born Michael Northam is often associated with what might be described as the maximalist tendency in electronic composition (along with Seth Nehil and John Grzinich, with whom he has often worked), building complex systems out of basic sonic molecules; for his 2001 Absurd release From within the solar cave he superimposed recordings of his source material up to 512 times to create one of the most extraordinary soundscapes of recent years (good luck hunting down a copy, though). The textures on Wormwood are just as rich and mysterious, though as not as dense, and the sound sources occasionally reveal their identity (fragments of birdsong, bells, amp buzz..). Sourced from a single late night recording session in December 2002 in East London, where Australian electronician Stern had been living for three years, these five (untitled) tracks use diverse objects and instruments, environmental recordings and feedback systems, manipulated electronically to produce a complex sonic web, generally slowmoving and reflective in character. "What interests me is remembering that as human beings we find ourselves constantly involved in complex and hyperviolent systems," Northam told Frédéric Claisse in an extensive and fascinating interview in the French magazine Revue & Corrigée 47 (March 2001). Wormwood isn't exactly hyperviolent - mildly disturbing at times, perhaps - but it's certainly complex. It's also eminently listenable, and another fine addition to expanding Ground Fault catalogue." —Dan Warburton - Paris Transantlantic

• "The clicking, clattering, scraping music of sound artists Joel Stern and Michael Northam opens up a subterranean, microscopic world of incredible mystery. Their sounds are by turns metallic, organic, electronic, and simply unidentifiable, and the cumulative effect of all these insectile clicks and theremin-like whines is something akin to the sensation of the first men confronting the massive nuclear-fueled ants from the cult horror classic Them. Northam and Stern's sounds are towering, intimidating—the tense metallic scrapes of the second track are downright terrifying—but there is still something intimate and small-scale in this music that contrasts with its sometimes overwhelming aura. The terror in this recording, more often than not, exists inconspicuously beneath your feet, rather than looming above your head.

Within this insular world they've created, Stern and Northam seem completely at home, unperturbed by the disorienting, unsettling noises they're making. Their contributions, needless to say, are inseparable from each other, and the whole has a completely natural and constructed feel, as if each detail is exactly in its proper place.

Wormwood is classified in Ground Fault's Series I (of the three divisions within the label's catalogue, this one is reserved for "quiet" and "ambient" music), but that hardly implies that this music could ever exist neutrally in the background. This is an atmosphere record that truly infects and infiltrates the natural ambience of anywhere it happens to be playing. Played quietly enough, Wormwood’s sounds hover sinisterly just on the edges of perception, poisonous fumes hanging invisibly (but fatally) in the air. With slightly more volume behind it, however, the album becomes oppressively dense; the music is all sharp edges and tiny charged particles, vibrating, electrified, buzzing with energized static that seems to crackle off the end of each sound pulse.

The five tracks all end abruptly, with a momentary pause between each, but the differences between the individual pieces are not so great as to make this a jarring transition. Rather, each track creates the impression of looking at the same scene from a slightly different angle; the busy underfoot chattering is always present, and the droning overtones and periodic interjections of noisy feedback as well, but in each new treatment of this basic material, the mood is subtly altered. On the fourth track, metallic pings form a more coherent rhythmic base than on any of the other tracks. There’s a clear sense of forward drive here in the halting, exotic-sounding rhythm, and it nicely complements the buzzing turned-backwards hums, subtle guitar-like tones, and high-pitched whines that make up the track.

The intensity of all this is in sharp contrast to the simplicity and general unobtrusiveness of the individual sounds; this is noise that breaks down the listener with subtlety and subversion rather than outright annihilation." - Ed Howard - Stylus

• "Both Stern and Northam work with lo-tech phonics: field recordings, found objects, contact mics, tape loops, etc. As with much music in this area, it comes down to the creators' choices in what's included, what's not, how much stress is placed on this or that element and, perhaps crucially, how to balance an economy of means with an abundance of outcome. When successful, the individual elements become invisible and the listener is confronted with a soundscape that's immediately accepted as "real", as something that bubbles along with its own life and pace, revealing as much or as little as the listener chooses to hear. The five tracks of "wormwood" accomplish this with deceptive ease, each offering a slightly different angle, each transparent as to its means, each unforced in its direction. Sometimes, as on the third piece, the balance tilts toward more a "musical" concoction (in this case, high-pitched, organ-like drones over a rustling underbelly) but more often the sounds are entirely a-musical, deriving from manipulated found elements. Among other things, this introduces an impressive airy quality, even as that air is tinged with ozone and gasoline. Throughout, it's never less than absorbing, thoughtful and ear-tickling." Biran Olewnik - Bagatellen

• "From their Series I comes one of the newest in a growing collection of tonal obscurities from the people of Ground Fault. Teaming up for the first time Australian, Stern and traveling American, Northam, took time out to record these five untitled tracks just outside of London. These men are what I call electro-acoustarians, those who research sound, in its most minute states, develop improvised tactics of dealing with the crunchy blips and awkward static and raise the bar for younger sound artists breaking into their own. Both artists here have presented their works in and outside of gallery/museum constructs to living rooms and other dens of introspection. What is unique is how well two meet as one to create a harmonic convergence so to speak. The feedback and coarse noise from found objects and other matter serve as an uncertain time map of sorts portraying an inherent sense of perturbed sound. In a nails-to-a-chalkboard approach to bowing the curve of this atonal shantytown is rank with loose ends and vague meanings, but why search for one? In essence what hovers here is the unspecific nature of space, which is quite heady." TJ Norris
• "By now the name Micheal Northam should no longer be unknown to you. He has released various solo CDs and works with others, such JGrinzich. Northam is known for his extensive use of field recordings (wind going through large pipes for instance) as well as using small, amplified objects. Joel Stern comes from the field of improvised music and has worked with people like Athony Guerra, Philip Samartzis, Oren Ambarchi and has had releases on Impermanent, TwoThousandAnd and Touch. The work they did together is more along the lines of Stern, going through, in an improvised manner, a whole bunch of found objects, prepared instruments, environmental recording and much to my surprise electronics and feedback systems. The five pieces were recorded little over a year ago on one night. Although Ground Fault labelled this as a 'series 1' release (meaning it should be quiet), I don't believe such is the case. Especially the feedback used in many of these pieces give an unsettling approach to the pieces. It occassionally has a might beep. Below there is the soft rumbling of objects, plastic bags, amplified pieces of metal strings and more such things used in the field of electro-acoustic music. This is a good and execution of ideas floating around, and certainly would fill the needs of a hungry consumer for more upfront microsound (crossing electro-acoustic music into the far end borders of noise), but at the same time it must be noted, it's also stuff that has be done before. Not that it differs very much, as I thought it was a most enjoyable work." -- Vital Weekly#408 (FdW)