This CD reaches me out of a barren, sun-tormented expanse, like Michel Redolfi’s “Desert Tracks” once did in 1988. Redolfi’s sounds were recorded in the Mojave Desert of California, while Scott Smallwood went to the Great Salt Lake Desert of Utah. The initial feeling is the same; that of a merciless torch of light out of bottomless voids of space and the tearing, rubbing emery of wind-slashed sand particles against your skin. The picture of the Enola Gay hangar doesn’t exactly add a cozy atmosphere, and the whole concept, even before listening, is that of an after-world, of remnants of human culture, of the human parenthesis on Earth… It’s great! I love these leftovers, these discarded artifacts of human activities, human thoughts. I like these ideas so much that I in fact once went to the States just to travel around to take pictures of garbage, garbage cans, garbage containers, wrecked cars, old wooden fruit boxes and so forth. I still recall the great garbage containers of Hibbing, Minnesota…

Scott Smallwood says in his introduction to the CD that the six first pieces on it are based on his own field recordings in the Wendover/Great Salt Lake Desert Region on the Utah/Nevada border. At the outset he was worried about the effect the high desert winds might have on his microphones, causing him technical traits, but as it turned out, the winds were his greatest assets! He further states that all the recorded sounds out there were produced by the wind.

“Debris” starts the set with sounds originating in a large pile of junk by Building 1819 at the Wendover Air Field, which is run by the U.S. Air Force. The items through which the winds of the desert blow include bedsprings, metal scraps, paper, car body parts and long concrete pipes.
It’s a murmuring, distant sound that emerges, slowly picking up intensity and density, as closer, individual sounds of the bed springs and the other rejected items start speaking up out of the loneliness of leftovers, out of forgotten intents, forgotten circumstances, lost contexts.
The atmosphere is a classical electroacoustic one, albeit perhaps more eerie here, in this total desolation of matter; the lonely desert wind speaking through the jerky, frictional tremor of discarded objects; a whine from the heart of matter… The classical property of this beautiful piece of audio is the combination of a whining and rumbling backdrop – a drone – caused by the full might of the wind, and the small, erratic and vibrating movements of smaller, closer sounds in from the junk pile, scribbling jerky signs of amnesia all over the horizon… It’s a magic soundscape that has to do with eons of time, cultures rising and falling, continents drifting, the planet creaking and twisting through endless straits of space-time! Junk and Wind and… Eternity!

“Night Walk” is the sounding result of a nocturnal stroll, which Scott Smallwood made on 18th July 2001, from 10 PM to midnight, around the Wendover Air Field. Some of the sounds are a large metal scrap blowing against a chain-link fence, a window frame on an abandoned shed rattling in the wind, plus pieces of paper and plastic caught in the brush. There are also background sounds to detect, like the sounds of Wendover at night, including the distant Interstate, crickets chirping, dogs barking and more.
The first think that strikes the listener is the sense of fast movement. If you weren’t certain that this was indeed the wind blowing past, you’d feel like you were riding some vehicle of the night across the desert, crossing the air field, disappearing on dark rails of fate into the night… There are rustles, weary movements of nocturnal spirits, Harry Partch hobos turning over in their sleep under their newspaper blankets.
Distant engines talk of life with intent and purpose, husbands traveling the lit up prayer bead of the highway, heading for the embraces of matrimony and the ecstasy of the moment, windows of a safe house open to the nocturnal sounds of cicadas and refracted stars piercing the black velvet sky…
There is something peacefully desolate about this piece, the closeness of garbage providing some protection as the Earth slowly turns and the wind surrounds you under the sky of destitutes…
I feel like huddling under the surge of life…

“Rusted Womb of Bomber” is a suiting title for the contents of this piece, recorded inside the hangar of Wendover Air Field, which housed the Enola Gay during World War II. For those not fully acquainted with our tragic human history, Enola Gay was the airplane that carried the Hiroshima bomb to its destination…
This too was recorded on the windy evening of 18th July 2001. The sensations of fate and ominous fore-bearings and dark, lurking shadows permeate this CD, which is one of the most haunting collections of sound art that I’ve heard. It brings so many feelings to the surface, some of which you might want to repress…
You immediately sense the large space inside the hangar. I can vividly place myself there inside these sounds; the dark open and empty space, the wind banging on huge sliding doors, metal against metal in a crushing, irresistible magnitude of might and weight, of the lurking memories of the BOMB that linger in the corners and high up under the roof. The sound of the wind, with the mighty hangar as a soundboard, overwhelms me, and my lively fantasy delivers a real scare! It is very illusive, this work of sound art; concrete down to the last mangling metal-crusher of ill will. It’s mighty; an echo of that moment in Hiroshima… a sound picture of the human mind and it’s worst capabilities…

“Wind Tunnels” has a different origin, since it in fact utilizes a work of art as a sounding object; Nancy Holt’s “Sun Tunnels”; a large sculpture/installation located in the Utah desert some 80 kilometers north of Wendover, near the ghost town of Lucin.
The rolling, timbrally rich sound surprises at first, in its sheer beauty, bring austere outer planet visions to the fore, as if these sounds were translations of the magnetic force fields of Uranus or Neptune, as they indeed have been recorded by NASA’s Voyager, released on some bizarre – but necessary! – CDs from Brain & Mind Research in Encinitas, California.
The timbres show the whole spectrum of timbres, from infra vibrations to wheezing high pitch shrills, in one, long exhalation of… yes, of what?!

“Chest & Chair” pretty well describes the sources of sound… Smallwood found a chest and a recliner chair lying about in the desert, as fallen from a deep blue sky… He recorded the wind shining on through!
It’s a tumbling, rocking and rolling array of sounds, black and brown sounds, physical sounds in which the chair and chest are readily palpable, like big chunks of rye bread between your teeth! It’s a munching piece; the wind munching away at these comrades of misfortune; the chest and the chair, like in a rag doll fairytale of sorts…

“Ruins of Clang” is the last desert track herein. Scott Smallwood recorded these sounds on 16th July 2001. Again he uses a work of art for his sound piece, but this time the ruins of an art piece; James Harbison’s “Wall of Clang”, a sound installation which Harbison built in 1998 from found metal materials for the desert winds to play on at the site of the Reilly Chemical Salt Works about 9 kilometers east of Wendover, Utah. This was a prototype for a larger installation, and when Smallwood approached it three years later, parts of the installation were still standing, giving off its sounds to the touch of the wind.
This is a heavily rustling and mumbling piece of sound, revolving around your senses like long hair and a parka hood in a Montana blizzard, but this blizzard is hot as a furnace and carrying nothing but the air itself and microscopic grains of sand, grinding you down to blistered remains in a short earthly while…

“Lucin” is a short take of the songbirds in the oasis of Lucin, and after the preceding sound pieces of dark desert forces, this sounds like a pre-human paradise of rippling water and brightly colored birds.

“Variations on a Door (no sigh)” (three of them, tracks 8 – 10) of course allude on Pierre Henry’s famous piece from 1963; “Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir”, albeit without the Soupir part… The sound here was not recorded by Smallwood, but by John Ffitch, and not at all in the Utah desert or anywhere near, but in such an unlikely place as the men’s restroom at the 2000 ICMC in Berlin, using the door as the sound source! Tally-hoe! Evidently this door has gone through quite a few permutations on the way, through halls of brassage time-stretch and whatnot. The result is very interesting, enjoyable, with a dancing background swirl of higher pitches and a repetitious close-up turmoil that sounds more like Jonty Harrison’s balloons than a restroom door… You name it, we like it!

The last work is “Trojan Chant”, serving the purpose of really good, classical sound poetry in the vein of Paul Lansky (“Idle Chatter”) or even more akin to the workings of Swedish pioneer and electronic guru Lars-Gunnar Bodin and his “For Jon III”, which you must listen to if you haven’t heard it!
Smallwood’s work is indeed a chant, arrived at by way of electronic treatments of some CSU Trojan fans chanting in LAX Airport, awaiting the heros’ arrival. A funny thing is that the chant that is insanely repeated in the style of early Steve Reich work “Come Out” (1966) sounds just like the Swedish sentence “här sitter jag”, which simply means “here I sit”! Well, it’s funny for Swedes, anyway! Besides, this brings on pure hypnosis, if you don’t watch yourselves! Further on the piece is so looped and layered that is turns into some sensual and ecstatic lovemaking unconsciousness! Beautiful to the last drop, just like vinegar on ice in the Arctic!