Chester Schultz: Sounds Like Work (DE LA CATESSEN RECORDS)
Adelaide’s De La Catessen offers the first issue in over 40 years of the long-lost soundscape composition Sounds Like Work, initially released on cassette in 1978, by South Australian composer and scholar, Chester Schultz. Schultz stands as one of our great discoveries of 2024.
Sounds Like Work draws from material recorded in late 1976 in the workplaces of members of the Maylands Church of Christ congregation, subsequently edited at the electronic music studio of Adelaide University in early 1978. Sounds Like Work addresses the multiple meanings, contexts and sonic details inscribed in the work environment. Foreground and background sounds intermingle. Biotic and non-biotic sounds appear. Labor and non-labor.
As is the case with so much field recording, time and critical distance play essential parts in the listening experience, revealing so much. De La Catessen writes, “Schultz's questions about the workplace—what it does to the worker; the ways the worker tries to wrest control of the working day; work's alignment, or not, with our inner private lives and beliefs—are poetically explored through lyrical editing, curious juxtaposition, and an unerring ability to know when to 'leave things be.'”
Like R. Murray Schafer, whose writings Schultz and others were reading around the time of these recordings, the emerging field of acoustic ecology suggests understanding and listening actively interrelate. These recordings feel both inspiring (as source material) and compelling beautiful (in arrangement).
This album also recalls other, loosely analogous compositions, like Luc Ferrari's Presque Rien. In this sense, Sounds Like Work subtly redraws the histories of Antipodean avant-garde sound, and beyond.
Highest Recommendation! Core 24!!
Adelaide’s De La Catessen offers the first issue in over 40 years of the long-lost soundscape composition Sounds Like Work, initially released on cassette in 1978, by South Australian composer and scholar, Chester Schultz. Schultz stands as one of our great discoveries of 2024.
Sounds Like Work draws from material recorded in late 1976 in the workplaces of members of the Maylands Church of Christ congregation, subsequently edited at the electronic music studio of Adelaide University in early 1978. Sounds Like Work addresses the multiple meanings, contexts and sonic details inscribed in the work environment. Foreground and background sounds intermingle. Biotic and non-biotic sounds appear. Labor and non-labor.
As is the case with so much field recording, time and critical distance play essential parts in the listening experience, revealing so much. De La Catessen writes, “Schultz's questions about the workplace—what it does to the worker; the ways the worker tries to wrest control of the working day; work's alignment, or not, with our inner private lives and beliefs—are poetically explored through lyrical editing, curious juxtaposition, and an unerring ability to know when to 'leave things be.'”
Like R. Murray Schafer, whose writings Schultz and others were reading around the time of these recordings, the emerging field of acoustic ecology suggests understanding and listening actively interrelate. These recordings feel both inspiring (as source material) and compelling beautiful (in arrangement).
This album also recalls other, loosely analogous compositions, like Luc Ferrari's Presque Rien. In this sense, Sounds Like Work subtly redraws the histories of Antipodean avant-garde sound, and beyond.
Highest Recommendation! Core 24!!
Adelaide’s De La Catessen offers the first issue in over 40 years of the long-lost soundscape composition Sounds Like Work, initially released on cassette in 1978, by South Australian composer and scholar, Chester Schultz. Schultz stands as one of our great discoveries of 2024.
Sounds Like Work draws from material recorded in late 1976 in the workplaces of members of the Maylands Church of Christ congregation, subsequently edited at the electronic music studio of Adelaide University in early 1978. Sounds Like Work addresses the multiple meanings, contexts and sonic details inscribed in the work environment. Foreground and background sounds intermingle. Biotic and non-biotic sounds appear. Labor and non-labor.
As is the case with so much field recording, time and critical distance play essential parts in the listening experience, revealing so much. De La Catessen writes, “Schultz's questions about the workplace—what it does to the worker; the ways the worker tries to wrest control of the working day; work's alignment, or not, with our inner private lives and beliefs—are poetically explored through lyrical editing, curious juxtaposition, and an unerring ability to know when to 'leave things be.'”
Like R. Murray Schafer, whose writings Schultz and others were reading around the time of these recordings, the emerging field of acoustic ecology suggests understanding and listening actively interrelate. These recordings feel both inspiring (as source material) and compelling beautiful (in arrangement).
This album also recalls other, loosely analogous compositions, like Luc Ferrari's Presque Rien. In this sense, Sounds Like Work subtly redraws the histories of Antipodean avant-garde sound, and beyond.
Highest Recommendation! Core 24!!