released October 17, 2018

Released by Glistening Examples on CD/DL

Recorded Lanzarote March 2018. Edited and mixed London Summer 2018.

Mastered by Jason Lescalleet at Glistening Labs USA

Thanks to Jason Lescalleet, Andrea Kearney, Cristina Pedreira Pérez,
Matthew Hammond, Sam Hayley Watts & Werner Herzog


REVIEWS

noisenotmusic.com

With Run Amok, a gorgeous new CD out on Glistening Examples, artist Tom White examines the volcanic landscape of Lanzarote, a Spanish island west of Morocco in the Atlantic. Lanzarote was the location where Werner Herzog filmed his absurdist black comedy Even Dwarfs Started Small. The 1971 movie, featuring the ridiculous escapades of a group of dwarfs as they rebel against the nameless institution in which they are confined, has a unique and elusive atmosphere despite its whimsicality, largely due to the mysterious environment in which it was filmed. Herzog and White each capture this environment in their own way, the former with beautiful blacks and whites and a wanton mixture of shaky camera work and static shots, and the latter with carefully mixed audio recordings. Though White doesn’t rely heavily on the use effects or processing techniques on these recordings, they are largely unidentifiable, spinning up into tactile, rocky whirlwinds like gravel in an air-popped popcorn machine. He makes use of many small scraping sounds, overlaying them and playing them backwards to create crackle collages that are both gritty and effervescent. When effects are used, they only increase the alien-ness of Lanzarote’s sound palette, whittled down to a dark, electric meditation on “Del Rio.” With ten tracks, White presents a lot of ideas, each distinct but naturally evolving into each other. While I’m not sure that Run Amok would make a good score for Even Dwarfs Started Small, the two works demonstrate how the attributes a physical place can be communicated in different ways.

weneednoswords.wordpress.com

‘Run Amok’ is Tom White’s homage, of sorts, to ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’, an early Werner Herzog outing that is either: a) a distasteful goofball misstep or b) a work of satirical gonzo genius, depending on your point of view. Filmed in 1970, in glorious monochrome, Herzog’s film centres on a group little people rebelling against confinement on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. While consensus seems to agree that Herzog’s film isn’t too insulting, what’s clear is that Lanzarote looks bloody great in it, with Thomas Mauch’s cinematography emphasising the barren, rocky beauty of the place.

It’s this bleached out grandeur, I think, that ‘Run Amok’ captures best. White visited a bunch of sites on Lanzarote, including the specific locations where Herzog’s film was shot, using field recordings he collected there as a basis for a series for subtle, texturally-rich pieces whose minimalism only emphasises their grainy tangibility.

White avoids any attempt to be faithful to his source material, instead cutting and manipulating it to serve his own vision. ‘An Incident At The Visitor Centre’ switches between airy bustle, intimate scrunch and distorted screech with abrupt drama, the edits creating a deliberately incomplete narrative that excites and frustrates in equal measure. In ‘Old Man With Medals’ an eerie, pulsating whine – presumably a post-priori addition by White – cuts through the patina of looping scuffles and clicks like a sonic weapon from a flying saucer. But what that title has to do what’s going down in the track is anyone’s guess.

Indeed, titles and content subvert and supplement each another throughout ‘Run Amok’, a dialectical shuffle that’s both ambiguous and evocative. A Seth Cooke-style sabotage of field recording orthodoxy gets a look in on titles such as ‘Jose Garcia Gardens’ and ‘No Stable Perspective’, with White’s chop-and-slice technique blasting any kind of locational integrity into claggy lumps. Elsewhere – ‘Wind and Institution’, ‘Tyre Roll’ – White’s choice of title suggests a potential fan edit of ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ to create something even stranger than Herzog’s original.

At its best, however, ‘Run Amok’ rises above the cerebral, enveloping us in a scratchy, hermetic sound-world of pure sensation. The snuffling repetitions of ‘Endless Rotation’ don’t need anything apart from their own coos and snaps to make them brilliant. Barrelling onwards in a seething cloud, ready to sweep up anything in their path, they’re reminiscent of the whirlwind from that other film in which little people play a defining role. Hold tight, Toto. We’re not in Kansas anymore.