CatalogueArtist: Jamie Drouin
Title: A Three Month Warm Up
Catalogue: de5023
Duration: 77:00
Format: CD-R
Edition: 250
Release: July 2009
BUY NOW
A Three Month Warm Up uses 124 individual field recordings made in an outdoor public square in Victoria (British Columbia, Canada) over a three month period, and is inspired by the cacophony of notes played by a symphony during warm up, where a single unified tone emerges out of the various instruments and voices. In playing back the ambient recordings, filtering them down to their essential 'notes' and layering the events, Drouin creates a sonic signature of the space, as if a residual echo of everything that occurred during those three months has been trapped within the structure.
A Three Month Warm Up was a site specific work created for the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's Assume Nothing exhibition January-May, 2009. Curated by Lisa Baldissera.
Reviews
Best of 2009 Lists:
Spiritual Archives
Album A Three Month Warm Up of Canadian audio designer Jamie Drouin released by label Dragon's Eye Recordings in summer 2009 has in its basis 124 field records made during three months in suburbs of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada). Thorough filtration comparable to getting of sound essence, led the initial sounds to the state when they convey their gist, their nerve. Jamie weaved with them layers putting several of them into general mix, varying in such a way the color of ambient canvas which sends to open space. Cosmos = silence? Nothing of the kind. Here he meets with moire drone ambient and you become a point, pixel lost in its endless darkness. Placers of planets around radiate unique sounds forming permanent drone. It seems that it never calms down and will last till there is life on these planets. Is it really space? Maybe yes, and maybe no. We've already heard such stratified sound works for many times. Today it's cosmos, tomorrow - a snowdrift among wild forest, after tomorrow - night swim through sea smooth towards the horizon dying out. The thing is in associations generated by mind, in pictures that are drawn by our imagination while contact with abstract art. Such records as A Three Month Warm Up sound charming enough to paint even more association scenarios of trips through your inner worlds.
– Sound Proector
First up is Canadian sound-shaper Jamie Drouin, founder of DE-affiliated Infrequency imprint. Having hosted Yann Novak's The Breeze Blowing Over Us, Drouin gets the Novak payback with A Three Month Warm Up. Their common ground is that of capturing spaces permeated by their animating presences, cf. the pair's +ROOM-ROOM, reviewed later that same profile. A total of 124 individual field recordings were captured, variously tweaked, then rolled out into "77:00." The sourcing draws on Drouin’s frequenting of a public square over an eponymous period, sampling its sound, pursuing a concept inspired by the orchestral warm-up ‘where a single tone emerges out of the various instruments and voices.’ In loose mimesis, the elements are filtered down to essence and stretched out into a nacreous soundcloud. A vast amorphous tract of flux and micro-mutability, this pointillist panoply of teeming thrum and space ranges between a veritable Boeing-747 of the stratospheric and a Köner-esque chthonic, layers of harmonised din and clatter vying in vain for prevalence. No monotone drone, this, as muffled traces of tones and pitches are spun to the outer from a whorling core. Shifts in intensity are evident between sections, with surges at the centre subsiding to whispers at the periphery. Originally a site-specific installation, Drouin creates an abstracted sonic sculpture of the space, as if a distillation of all of those three months were trapped in its amber.
– Furthernoise
First there is Jamie Drouin who had releases before on this label, as well as Cryoworks and Infrequency. For a site specific work for the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's Asssume Nothing exhibition he created this seventy-seven work, which deals with 124 individual field recordings 'made in an outdoor public square' in Victoria over a three month period and is inspired 'by the cacophony of notes played by a symphony during warm up'. Drouin layers all the field recordings into one long swarming mass of sound, like indeed the orchestra tuning up, but much slower and without a single event to be recognized. Or perhaps like a church full of mumbling voices. Over the course of these seventy-seven minutes, the color of the music is slowly changes, changing from dark to a bit lighter and brighter and then slowly towards the dark again. Ambient music as it is supposed to be according to the text book of Brian Eno. Music derived from everyday, common sounds surrounding us. Maybe in that respect Drouin doesn't have to offer much news to the initiated in the world of ambient music, but the longitude of the work makes much sense. Play at a low volume and let it surround you.
– Vital Weekly
Pour fabriquer A Three Month Warm Up, le Canadien James Drouin a enregistré pendant trois mois les ambiances d'un square de Victoria. Il a ensuite ramené les sons à la maison pour les traiter électroniquement avant d'envoyer le tout à la galerie d'art qui lui avait eu la bonne idée de lui passer commande.
Pour présenter plus concrètement A Three Month Warm Up, on pourrait parler de 77 minutes d'atmosphères compactées et de leurs volutes ouateuses qui vomissent de temps en temps une voix, ou au moins un mirage de voix. Le reste de l'écoute est une exploration de couloirs (atmosphériques eux-aussi) sans fin formant un fantastique labyrinthe suspendu dans lequel n'importe qui sera pris à perdre ses repères, corporels et sonores.
– Le Son Du Grisli
Le cinéma, dans le sillage de la photographie, n’a eu de cesse depuis son invention de réinterpréter la réalité dans laquelle nous vivons (ou croyons vivre!). De distordre les images directement prélevées de notre environnement. Au sommet de cette démarche de déconstruction du réel, trône peut-être le film Koyaanisqatsi. Œuvre protéiforme jouant sur les échelles de temps et d’espace pour transcender totalement la perception tristement banale et finalement incomplète que nous avons de notre civilisation occidentale. Et par la même de notre propre quotidien.
La musique de Jamie Drouin s’inscrit directement dans cette optique de transfiguration de la réalité. Pas étonnant d’ailleurs que ce sound designer canadien, pour le moins discret, se révèle être une des figures clé de l’écurie Dragon’s Eye Recording. Un des labels pionniers dans le genre.
A Three Month Warm Up est en fait une piste d’ambient music colossale. Colossale de par sa durée : 74 minutes. Mais aussi de par la technique utilisée. Jamie Drouin fait s’entremêler ici 124 field recordings. Tous capturés sur une période de trois mois dans un square publique au Canada puis retravaillés entièrement par ordinateur jusqu’à en devenir méconnaissables.
Le résultat ainsi obtenu est pour le moins surprenant. Ces sonorités abstraites et irréelles, fruits d’instants perdus du quotidien d’un parc public, balayent le spectre sonore comme des vents solaires. Alors que Jamie Drouin aurait pu tomber dans l’ascétisme expérimental imbuvable, il a réalisé un vrai travail de composition qui donne une dimension hautement émotionnelle à son propos.
Et c’est bien là que se situe le tour de force. A Three Month Warm Up, oeuvre environnementale plus qu’atmosphérique, fait émerger d’un matériel sonore en apparence parfaitement désincarné, une gravité et une mélancolie insoupçonnés.
– dMute
Stringatezza che manca al lavoro del coetaneo canadese Jamie Drouin. In questo caso la materia di partenza è costituita precisamente da centoventiquattro diverse registrazioni ambientali, repertate nel corso di tre mesi in una pubblica piazza di Victoria nella British Columbia. Trattate in modo massiccio e assemblate in tutt'unicodalla stordente stratificazione, come si trattasse di suoni provenienti da una prova d'orchestra, in tal moso Drouin tende a configurare una personale topografia dello spazio d'origine, evidente effetto residuale degli accadimenti fonici ivi catturati.
– Blow Up Magazine
A site specific work created by Drouin for a 2009 Art Gallery of Greater Victoria exhibition, A Three Month Warm Up presents an uninterrupted windstorm assembled from 124 individual field recordings made in an outdoor public square in Victoria, British Columbia over a three-month period. Though Drouin took his inspiration from the multitude of notes heard during a symphony orchestra's warm-up, he shapes those varying instrument sounds into a singular mass, specifically a blurry behemoth that seethes, rumbles, and howls for seventy-seven minutes. Drouin filtered down the original recordings to their essence and then layered them to form the gargantuan mass documented on the recording. Imagine the sounds a microphone would pick up dangling from the wing of a 747 at its greatest height and you'll have a pretty good idea of what the recording sounds like. It's not a monochromatic drone, however; muffled traces of instrument tones and pitches can be detected at the center, seemingly struggling to wrest themselves from the vortex and separate from the mass. The piece also undergoes subtle changes in intensity, with the feverish pitch of one section giving way to a more subdued attack halfway through. Fifty minutes in, string tones briefly surge to the forefront before becoming mere whispers murmuring at the periphery. When the piece comes to a close, it disappears into silence like a plane gradually vanishing into the sky. Drouin never falters in sustaining the captivating work's impact as it repeatedly undergoes, often almost imperceptibly, such metamorphoses.
– Textura
This a new instalment of Canadian sound and multimedia artist Jamie Drouin who also is the founder member of the Infrequency imprint. “A Three Month Warm Up” is a work that takes three months and consists of recordings taken from the cacophony notes played by a symphony orchestra during warm up and Drouin elaborated from this sound source a single tone out of the several instruments and voices. These field recordings went into the processing creating vast drone sections. In this CD-R in a limited run of 250 copies is a one piece only of 77 minutes of duration in which the underrated sounds of space dimensions are explored. The environmental recordings draw lengthy passages of discrete silence. A perfect state of mind for stillness and concentration.
– Loop
124 individual field recordings are used for the over one hour long piece A three month warm up. For three months long Jamie Drouin has been visiting a public square in Victoria (Canada) to record. With the recorded sounds Drouin started working on a piece where the start point was an idea of a symphony “tuning” there instruments. The layered and filtered ambient recordings resemble the cacophony you hear at this point; at least that is the conceptual idea behind this album.
Indeed, this resemblance can be heard on the album A Three Month Warm Up. Sounds fill the whole piece in a non-structured, but harmonic way. Long stretched notes follow each other flowing through the air. None of the original sounds can be recognized making the source unimportant. For what it is worth the piece breathes the air of a crowded square where a lot is happening but if this in a Canadian city or on the Red Square in Moscow or The Dam Square in Amsterdam wouldn’t have mattered for the result we hear here. I guess even recordings from a forest treated in the correct way could sound like this. This doesn’t necessarily make it a bad piece, on the contrary, but more points of recognition could have made this a stronger idea (even if you keep the symphony in mind).
If you forget about the whole concept the piece sounds like so much other dark ambient pieces. Soundscapes that could easily fit in with one of the sleeping sessions done by Robert Rich. With this we can conclude this is a nice album, but nothing more than that.
– Earlabs
Such are the ebb and flow qualities of Jamie Drouin‘s work – A Three Month Warm Up too although with a very different offset. The warm-up of a symphony orchestra is the inspiration – and the basis through which over 120 field recordings of such a phase were made in an outdoor public area in Victoria. The symphony’s sounds broken down into its constituent pieces and instruments from that one, united sound as a basis, Drouin then stretched and expanded those sounds across a longer expanse – in which was also presented as a sound installation over a period of 3 months for the Assume Nothing exhibition at the Art Gallery og Greater Victoria in the winter of 2009. Not easily recognisable in its transformed, droning form as the familiar, cacophony of a symphony orchestra coursing its way to reach a concord where it all unites as one, yet the long-form sonic textures are comforting and incur a calmness as waves of sound grow in force then dissipate again, together and also with the feeling of separate forces – instruments – reaching to attain the same level to play in unison.
– Soundscaping
The title of sound artist Jamie Drouin’s ‘A Three Month Warm Up’ refers both to the time taken to collect the 124 individual sound recordings, taken from a public square in Drouin’s home of Victoria, Canada, which make up this work, and to its inspiration: the ‘atonal cacophony’ produced by orchestral players before commencing a performance. Drouin’s work relates more specifically to the tuning up phase, ‘where a single tone emerges out of the various instruments and voices’, as that is what happens here: the essential features of these 124 elements are flattened, smeared into one vast, shimmering haze, a 77-minute amorphous drone, endlessly in flux and from which it is impossible to discern its components.
It sounds like Thomas Koner, only thicker, and the approach is like that of Jacob Kirkegaard’s ‘Four Rooms’, in which Kirkegaard recorded the sound of four now empty public spaces in Chernobyl, played the recordings back in these spaces, and rerecorded the results. If Drouin’s work necessarily lacks the – literal – air of alienation and abandonment present in ‘Four Rooms’, the density of his sound more than makes up for it. Layer upon layer of hiss, din, noise, and clamour constantly jostle for attention, all futile; tones creep in and vanish, but its the full mass that’s always heard, endlessly shifting, endlessly surging forth. Its deeply, beautifully unsettling, a perpetual approach with no end in sight, like Edvard Munch’s infinite scream; the chaos of modern urban life packed into a public square and let loose.
– Cyclic Defrost Magazine
Another wonderful release from Dragon’s Eye in the shape of a supremely deep work from long-time friend and collaborator Jamie Drouin. This album is the type of listening experience that words and samples simply can’t do any justice to. A Three Month Warm Up was created using 124 individual sound recordings from an outdoor public square in Victoria, Canada over a three month period. The concept for this work, originally a site-specific installation, is based around the a-tonal, cacophonous sound of an orchestra warming up as it gradually finds a tone and sound emerging from the noise. That said this is anything but a cacophony. True, there’s an element of noise here, particularly at the beginning, but it’s such an awesomely deep and arctic style sound that it immediately grabbed me and never let go. You’ll find that over the course of the piece, which clocks in at one hour sixteen minutes, there are subtle shifts in tone and mood and all of the sounds sources glide gracefully into a majestic, dramatic and simply very beautiful textural work. If there was ever a perfect soundtrack for trekking across the Antarctic, this is surely it as it gives off a wind-blown sense of isolation and desolation. But it remains somehow warm and inviting at the same time (although that may, of course, be more a reflection of the type of person I am than anything else!) Again, I’ll stress that this is something to sit back and experience rather try and establish how you feel about it from two one minute samples. What I will say is that it’s on Dragon’s Eye, it’s by a wonderfully talented artist and I’m highly recommending it to people that enjoy the deepest of drones and textures. You’ll need to make your mind up from that – but I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. Absolutely awesome sounds.
– Smallfish
Fellow soul Jamie Drouin released Novak´s record on his label Infrequency, and Novak returned the favour by releasing Drouin´s ”A Three Month Warm Up” on his CDR label Dragon´s Eye Recordings. Both share the ambition to record spaces permeated by the lives passing through them and Dragon´s Eye is becoming something of a ”brand standard” for similarly-inclined artists.
Had the listener not been informed of Drouin´s raw material – one hundred and twenty-four separate recordings of daily life scuttling over a square in downtown Victoria, BC - he or she woud simply enjoy the feel of soaring through cool, clear air. And a lovely seventy-seven minutes at that.
– Sonomu
<< Back
Title: A Three Month Warm Up
Catalogue: de5023
Duration: 77:00
Format: CD-R
Edition: 250
Release: July 2009
BUY NOW
A Three Month Warm Up uses 124 individual field recordings made in an outdoor public square in Victoria (British Columbia, Canada) over a three month period, and is inspired by the cacophony of notes played by a symphony during warm up, where a single unified tone emerges out of the various instruments and voices. In playing back the ambient recordings, filtering them down to their essential 'notes' and layering the events, Drouin creates a sonic signature of the space, as if a residual echo of everything that occurred during those three months has been trapped within the structure.
A Three Month Warm Up was a site specific work created for the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's Assume Nothing exhibition January-May, 2009. Curated by Lisa Baldissera.
Reviews
Best of 2009 Lists:
Spiritual Archives
Album A Three Month Warm Up of Canadian audio designer Jamie Drouin released by label Dragon's Eye Recordings in summer 2009 has in its basis 124 field records made during three months in suburbs of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada). Thorough filtration comparable to getting of sound essence, led the initial sounds to the state when they convey their gist, their nerve. Jamie weaved with them layers putting several of them into general mix, varying in such a way the color of ambient canvas which sends to open space. Cosmos = silence? Nothing of the kind. Here he meets with moire drone ambient and you become a point, pixel lost in its endless darkness. Placers of planets around radiate unique sounds forming permanent drone. It seems that it never calms down and will last till there is life on these planets. Is it really space? Maybe yes, and maybe no. We've already heard such stratified sound works for many times. Today it's cosmos, tomorrow - a snowdrift among wild forest, after tomorrow - night swim through sea smooth towards the horizon dying out. The thing is in associations generated by mind, in pictures that are drawn by our imagination while contact with abstract art. Such records as A Three Month Warm Up sound charming enough to paint even more association scenarios of trips through your inner worlds.
– Sound Proector
First up is Canadian sound-shaper Jamie Drouin, founder of DE-affiliated Infrequency imprint. Having hosted Yann Novak's The Breeze Blowing Over Us, Drouin gets the Novak payback with A Three Month Warm Up. Their common ground is that of capturing spaces permeated by their animating presences, cf. the pair's +ROOM-ROOM, reviewed later that same profile. A total of 124 individual field recordings were captured, variously tweaked, then rolled out into "77:00." The sourcing draws on Drouin’s frequenting of a public square over an eponymous period, sampling its sound, pursuing a concept inspired by the orchestral warm-up ‘where a single tone emerges out of the various instruments and voices.’ In loose mimesis, the elements are filtered down to essence and stretched out into a nacreous soundcloud. A vast amorphous tract of flux and micro-mutability, this pointillist panoply of teeming thrum and space ranges between a veritable Boeing-747 of the stratospheric and a Köner-esque chthonic, layers of harmonised din and clatter vying in vain for prevalence. No monotone drone, this, as muffled traces of tones and pitches are spun to the outer from a whorling core. Shifts in intensity are evident between sections, with surges at the centre subsiding to whispers at the periphery. Originally a site-specific installation, Drouin creates an abstracted sonic sculpture of the space, as if a distillation of all of those three months were trapped in its amber.
– Furthernoise
First there is Jamie Drouin who had releases before on this label, as well as Cryoworks and Infrequency. For a site specific work for the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's Asssume Nothing exhibition he created this seventy-seven work, which deals with 124 individual field recordings 'made in an outdoor public square' in Victoria over a three month period and is inspired 'by the cacophony of notes played by a symphony during warm up'. Drouin layers all the field recordings into one long swarming mass of sound, like indeed the orchestra tuning up, but much slower and without a single event to be recognized. Or perhaps like a church full of mumbling voices. Over the course of these seventy-seven minutes, the color of the music is slowly changes, changing from dark to a bit lighter and brighter and then slowly towards the dark again. Ambient music as it is supposed to be according to the text book of Brian Eno. Music derived from everyday, common sounds surrounding us. Maybe in that respect Drouin doesn't have to offer much news to the initiated in the world of ambient music, but the longitude of the work makes much sense. Play at a low volume and let it surround you.
– Vital Weekly
Pour fabriquer A Three Month Warm Up, le Canadien James Drouin a enregistré pendant trois mois les ambiances d'un square de Victoria. Il a ensuite ramené les sons à la maison pour les traiter électroniquement avant d'envoyer le tout à la galerie d'art qui lui avait eu la bonne idée de lui passer commande.
Pour présenter plus concrètement A Three Month Warm Up, on pourrait parler de 77 minutes d'atmosphères compactées et de leurs volutes ouateuses qui vomissent de temps en temps une voix, ou au moins un mirage de voix. Le reste de l'écoute est une exploration de couloirs (atmosphériques eux-aussi) sans fin formant un fantastique labyrinthe suspendu dans lequel n'importe qui sera pris à perdre ses repères, corporels et sonores.
– Le Son Du Grisli
Le cinéma, dans le sillage de la photographie, n’a eu de cesse depuis son invention de réinterpréter la réalité dans laquelle nous vivons (ou croyons vivre!). De distordre les images directement prélevées de notre environnement. Au sommet de cette démarche de déconstruction du réel, trône peut-être le film Koyaanisqatsi. Œuvre protéiforme jouant sur les échelles de temps et d’espace pour transcender totalement la perception tristement banale et finalement incomplète que nous avons de notre civilisation occidentale. Et par la même de notre propre quotidien.
La musique de Jamie Drouin s’inscrit directement dans cette optique de transfiguration de la réalité. Pas étonnant d’ailleurs que ce sound designer canadien, pour le moins discret, se révèle être une des figures clé de l’écurie Dragon’s Eye Recording. Un des labels pionniers dans le genre.
A Three Month Warm Up est en fait une piste d’ambient music colossale. Colossale de par sa durée : 74 minutes. Mais aussi de par la technique utilisée. Jamie Drouin fait s’entremêler ici 124 field recordings. Tous capturés sur une période de trois mois dans un square publique au Canada puis retravaillés entièrement par ordinateur jusqu’à en devenir méconnaissables.
Le résultat ainsi obtenu est pour le moins surprenant. Ces sonorités abstraites et irréelles, fruits d’instants perdus du quotidien d’un parc public, balayent le spectre sonore comme des vents solaires. Alors que Jamie Drouin aurait pu tomber dans l’ascétisme expérimental imbuvable, il a réalisé un vrai travail de composition qui donne une dimension hautement émotionnelle à son propos.
Et c’est bien là que se situe le tour de force. A Three Month Warm Up, oeuvre environnementale plus qu’atmosphérique, fait émerger d’un matériel sonore en apparence parfaitement désincarné, une gravité et une mélancolie insoupçonnés.
– dMute
Stringatezza che manca al lavoro del coetaneo canadese Jamie Drouin. In questo caso la materia di partenza è costituita precisamente da centoventiquattro diverse registrazioni ambientali, repertate nel corso di tre mesi in una pubblica piazza di Victoria nella British Columbia. Trattate in modo massiccio e assemblate in tutt'unicodalla stordente stratificazione, come si trattasse di suoni provenienti da una prova d'orchestra, in tal moso Drouin tende a configurare una personale topografia dello spazio d'origine, evidente effetto residuale degli accadimenti fonici ivi catturati.
– Blow Up Magazine
A site specific work created by Drouin for a 2009 Art Gallery of Greater Victoria exhibition, A Three Month Warm Up presents an uninterrupted windstorm assembled from 124 individual field recordings made in an outdoor public square in Victoria, British Columbia over a three-month period. Though Drouin took his inspiration from the multitude of notes heard during a symphony orchestra's warm-up, he shapes those varying instrument sounds into a singular mass, specifically a blurry behemoth that seethes, rumbles, and howls for seventy-seven minutes. Drouin filtered down the original recordings to their essence and then layered them to form the gargantuan mass documented on the recording. Imagine the sounds a microphone would pick up dangling from the wing of a 747 at its greatest height and you'll have a pretty good idea of what the recording sounds like. It's not a monochromatic drone, however; muffled traces of instrument tones and pitches can be detected at the center, seemingly struggling to wrest themselves from the vortex and separate from the mass. The piece also undergoes subtle changes in intensity, with the feverish pitch of one section giving way to a more subdued attack halfway through. Fifty minutes in, string tones briefly surge to the forefront before becoming mere whispers murmuring at the periphery. When the piece comes to a close, it disappears into silence like a plane gradually vanishing into the sky. Drouin never falters in sustaining the captivating work's impact as it repeatedly undergoes, often almost imperceptibly, such metamorphoses.
– Textura
This a new instalment of Canadian sound and multimedia artist Jamie Drouin who also is the founder member of the Infrequency imprint. “A Three Month Warm Up” is a work that takes three months and consists of recordings taken from the cacophony notes played by a symphony orchestra during warm up and Drouin elaborated from this sound source a single tone out of the several instruments and voices. These field recordings went into the processing creating vast drone sections. In this CD-R in a limited run of 250 copies is a one piece only of 77 minutes of duration in which the underrated sounds of space dimensions are explored. The environmental recordings draw lengthy passages of discrete silence. A perfect state of mind for stillness and concentration.
– Loop
124 individual field recordings are used for the over one hour long piece A three month warm up. For three months long Jamie Drouin has been visiting a public square in Victoria (Canada) to record. With the recorded sounds Drouin started working on a piece where the start point was an idea of a symphony “tuning” there instruments. The layered and filtered ambient recordings resemble the cacophony you hear at this point; at least that is the conceptual idea behind this album.
Indeed, this resemblance can be heard on the album A Three Month Warm Up. Sounds fill the whole piece in a non-structured, but harmonic way. Long stretched notes follow each other flowing through the air. None of the original sounds can be recognized making the source unimportant. For what it is worth the piece breathes the air of a crowded square where a lot is happening but if this in a Canadian city or on the Red Square in Moscow or The Dam Square in Amsterdam wouldn’t have mattered for the result we hear here. I guess even recordings from a forest treated in the correct way could sound like this. This doesn’t necessarily make it a bad piece, on the contrary, but more points of recognition could have made this a stronger idea (even if you keep the symphony in mind).
If you forget about the whole concept the piece sounds like so much other dark ambient pieces. Soundscapes that could easily fit in with one of the sleeping sessions done by Robert Rich. With this we can conclude this is a nice album, but nothing more than that.
– Earlabs
Such are the ebb and flow qualities of Jamie Drouin‘s work – A Three Month Warm Up too although with a very different offset. The warm-up of a symphony orchestra is the inspiration – and the basis through which over 120 field recordings of such a phase were made in an outdoor public area in Victoria. The symphony’s sounds broken down into its constituent pieces and instruments from that one, united sound as a basis, Drouin then stretched and expanded those sounds across a longer expanse – in which was also presented as a sound installation over a period of 3 months for the Assume Nothing exhibition at the Art Gallery og Greater Victoria in the winter of 2009. Not easily recognisable in its transformed, droning form as the familiar, cacophony of a symphony orchestra coursing its way to reach a concord where it all unites as one, yet the long-form sonic textures are comforting and incur a calmness as waves of sound grow in force then dissipate again, together and also with the feeling of separate forces – instruments – reaching to attain the same level to play in unison.
– Soundscaping
The title of sound artist Jamie Drouin’s ‘A Three Month Warm Up’ refers both to the time taken to collect the 124 individual sound recordings, taken from a public square in Drouin’s home of Victoria, Canada, which make up this work, and to its inspiration: the ‘atonal cacophony’ produced by orchestral players before commencing a performance. Drouin’s work relates more specifically to the tuning up phase, ‘where a single tone emerges out of the various instruments and voices’, as that is what happens here: the essential features of these 124 elements are flattened, smeared into one vast, shimmering haze, a 77-minute amorphous drone, endlessly in flux and from which it is impossible to discern its components.
It sounds like Thomas Koner, only thicker, and the approach is like that of Jacob Kirkegaard’s ‘Four Rooms’, in which Kirkegaard recorded the sound of four now empty public spaces in Chernobyl, played the recordings back in these spaces, and rerecorded the results. If Drouin’s work necessarily lacks the – literal – air of alienation and abandonment present in ‘Four Rooms’, the density of his sound more than makes up for it. Layer upon layer of hiss, din, noise, and clamour constantly jostle for attention, all futile; tones creep in and vanish, but its the full mass that’s always heard, endlessly shifting, endlessly surging forth. Its deeply, beautifully unsettling, a perpetual approach with no end in sight, like Edvard Munch’s infinite scream; the chaos of modern urban life packed into a public square and let loose.
– Cyclic Defrost Magazine
Another wonderful release from Dragon’s Eye in the shape of a supremely deep work from long-time friend and collaborator Jamie Drouin. This album is the type of listening experience that words and samples simply can’t do any justice to. A Three Month Warm Up was created using 124 individual sound recordings from an outdoor public square in Victoria, Canada over a three month period. The concept for this work, originally a site-specific installation, is based around the a-tonal, cacophonous sound of an orchestra warming up as it gradually finds a tone and sound emerging from the noise. That said this is anything but a cacophony. True, there’s an element of noise here, particularly at the beginning, but it’s such an awesomely deep and arctic style sound that it immediately grabbed me and never let go. You’ll find that over the course of the piece, which clocks in at one hour sixteen minutes, there are subtle shifts in tone and mood and all of the sounds sources glide gracefully into a majestic, dramatic and simply very beautiful textural work. If there was ever a perfect soundtrack for trekking across the Antarctic, this is surely it as it gives off a wind-blown sense of isolation and desolation. But it remains somehow warm and inviting at the same time (although that may, of course, be more a reflection of the type of person I am than anything else!) Again, I’ll stress that this is something to sit back and experience rather try and establish how you feel about it from two one minute samples. What I will say is that it’s on Dragon’s Eye, it’s by a wonderfully talented artist and I’m highly recommending it to people that enjoy the deepest of drones and textures. You’ll need to make your mind up from that – but I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. Absolutely awesome sounds.
– Smallfish
Fellow soul Jamie Drouin released Novak´s record on his label Infrequency, and Novak returned the favour by releasing Drouin´s ”A Three Month Warm Up” on his CDR label Dragon´s Eye Recordings. Both share the ambition to record spaces permeated by the lives passing through them and Dragon´s Eye is becoming something of a ”brand standard” for similarly-inclined artists.
Had the listener not been informed of Drouin´s raw material – one hundred and twenty-four separate recordings of daily life scuttling over a square in downtown Victoria, BC - he or she woud simply enjoy the feel of soaring through cool, clear air. And a lovely seventy-seven minutes at that.
– Sonomu
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