Muir, Jake: Campana Sonans LP

Jake Muir returns with a new album capturing the sound of Berlin’s church bells and British change ringing, where huge sets of tuned church bells are struck in mathematical sequence, complete with subtle but highly tripped out location recordings of the bell ringers and their environment. If yr into work by Gavin Bryars, Áine O'Dwyer or Philip Corner, this one’s for you.

When he moved from Los Angeles to Germany, Muir's first instinct was to reflect on where he was coming from, imagining a surrogate soundtrack to Hollywood's gay porn underground on 'Bathhouse Blues'. But the longer he was in Berlin, the more he found himself drawn to the municipal soundscape - the kind of sounds that Europeans has been exposed to for so long they no longer registered. Berlin’s regular, monotonous bells were particularly intriguing; ringing out into the street at a scale that was unimaginable in the New World. So Muir began to record the sounds, hopping from church to church to capture not just the ringing itself but the sound of the different spaces - from busy Berlin streets to open parks - to piece together his own sonic portrait of the city, far from sticky dancefloors and booming soundsystems. 

While he was researching the history of bell ringing in Europe, Muir stumbled across the UK tradition of change ringing, where huge sets of tuned bells are struck in mathematical sequence, creating long, constantly varying "changes" that'll be familiar to anyone who's ever ventured near a church on Sunday. Wandering from parish to parish in the UK, Muir was welcomed in by various small teams of campanologists who were surprised an American tourist was even interested. With an unprecedented level of access, he was able to record the bells close up and even capture the interactions between the bell ringers as they responded to the shouted calls that direct the sequences. 

So the two discrete sides of 'Campana Sonans' are created with different concepts in mind; the first, 'Erzklang', finds Muir documenting his new home city and its unique sonic characteristics, while 'Changes' is a Picasso-like examination of British change ringing, drawn from many angles at once. Muir sets the scene with local ambiance on the former, letting the solemn, monastic chimes cut through flapping wings, footsteps, nonchalant whistling and birdsong. We're set down in the city, and the noise disappears almost completely as the sonorous bells take hold. Berlin's incessant tram squeals and provides an accent; Muir stretches out each tone so it undulates like a hum beneath the surface, and coaxes our ears to fill in the gaps. Clean, unprocessed bell sounds criss-cross hissing, noisy textures as Berlin's various neighbourhoods begin to blur into each other like the mid-day walk home after a dizzy, wet weekend.

'Changes' on the flip begins with a callback, echoing the first side with doom-y single bell chimes that Muir polishes with swirled, ghostly resonances. It's the tune-up before the main event; Muir dips to near-silence as human voices prepare us for what we're about to hear, bellowing commands to a full circle of bells that lopes and shimmers, kinked by Muir's gentle guiding hand. To date, he's worked with both environmental recordings and carefully picked samples; but on 'Capana Sonans', he sounds as if he's experimenting with a different methodology. There are concepts pulled from both techniques, but Muir is reacting to music as it exists in an environment, pulling apart an instrument and its history by splaying its tonality and juxtaposing various in-situ sounds. Even if we've heard bell ringing, most of us haven't been up into the bell tower and heard the ringers nattering to each other, or the sub-rupturing bass tones that warble from the gigantic resonators when you're up that close. The effect is like hearing history in a brief reverie; Muir isn't trying to recreate church music, but to bring us closer to an intangible moment in our history. 

Beautiful, thoughtful stuff, right at home on the ace enmossed label next to gurgly, hallucinogenic gear from artists like bad lsd trips and Angelo Harmsworth, but fans of Gavin Bryars' 'The Leeds Bells' or Charlemagne Palestine's 'Bells Studies' should  investigate without delay.