Cornelia Parker is a name that springs to mind when considering the many levels of conceptual art. In a crowded field, Parker stands out because of the extent she goes to provide her works with meaning. Her recent exhibition Doubtful Sound underlined this; each of the pieces – from earplugs to burnt hymnals (rescued from churches struck by lightning), to the major piece Perpetual Canon – contained additional dimensions that increased one’s appreciation of the work beyond the immediate, surface, response. For example, the earplugs were not merely assembled from another material, which may have been enough for some artists, but were made of dust gathered from the Whispering Gallery of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which – if nothing else – shows Parker to be an artist able to balance some of her more profound pieces with a witty lightness of touch. The added levels of meaning in art is nothing new, of course – one could trace a line back from the squashed brass instruments used in Perpetual Canon to the lapis lazuli used by medieval artists to give the Virgin Mary a dazzling (and expensive) blue robe – but recently it has found a parallel in music, with a new wave of sound artists.

Often these artists would find their work confined to galleries, but the last twenty years or so have seen conceptual sound works gaining higher profile releases. Albums are recorded in specific locations, or with certain particular instruments to provide extra meaning (a recent example being Battery Townsley); like art found in galleries, however, it is vital that these records can exist outside of the extra conceptual levels. Imagine going round a modern art gallery and finding that none of the works are labelled or have explanations; they must stand on their own and the viewer must trust his or her own aesthetic appreciation. So it is with records that are backed by extra layers of conceptual thought; they must work without the listener having to wade through the sleevenotes to discover that where, how and why each certain track was recorded.

Blake Carrington’s Cathedral Scan comes loaded with extra meaning, as one might expect for a work created for an MFA Thesis. But, crucially, it is a work that one can appreciate – enjoy, even – without recourse to the project’s genesis. The pieces are based on architectural floor plans of gothic cathedrals, scanned in and treated as scores, and the album is an edited version of a performance at Syracuse University’s Hendricks chapel. Carrington provides further information on his website. However, the crux of the matter is that no matter how much thought and preparation has been put into the work, if the result is painful to listen to then the work is a failure. Thankfully this is not (quite) the case; the pieces sound like variations on Kid 606’s “Dandy”, all juddering ambience and static undercurrents that can exist on their own – it is when they are all grouped together that problems occur.

Perhaps due to the similarity of cathedral design, there is not a great deal of variety here, with only the occasional dash away from the steady, chattering electronic bed. These include the bass bursts of “Scan 2: Not Amiens-Notre Dame”, the helicopter throb of “Scan 8: Not Bourges-X”, the brief rising progressions of “Scan 3: Not Salisbury” and “Scan 6: Not Chartres”. But by the midway point, one is beginning to yearn for a little more colour in the sounds, for a different style of floor plan to be used. Utilising the architecture of Madreburg and Bourges Cathedrals for tracks/scans 7 and 8 respectively provide a little change of mood, with a clear contrast between the designs of these majestic buildings; but then the familiar tones return for the closing pieces, causing no end of frustration.

In the end, Carrington suffers from the same response that many other artists do – it is impossible to really appreciate the work without understanding the thought behind it. Away from the concept, Cathedral Scan is a pretty unremarkable work; the lack of variety across the ten pieces results in an album that sounds good in short bursts but is wearing across the full duration. The original performance was more than twice as long as these extracts; listeners could drift in and out of the chapel if they so desired, and they had the video screens to make the link between floorplan and music explicit. Without this, the repetition of the drones and tones in Cathedral Scan turn into so much white noise.
– Richard Allen