Sub Routine (AL)

by: Alan Lockett
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Entia Non is the token behind which Australian artist James McDougall plies his audio reconstruction trade in the name of experimental ambient. The project name finds its genesis (presumably) in the maxim known as Occam’s Razor Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem (“Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily”). This may accurately represent the general tendency of the philosophy of Occam and his followers, but its principle of parsimony sits uneasily as an articulation of the expressive ethos of Entia Non’s Sub Routine; so much so in fact, especially given the multi-phonic inclination of his work across several releases in the past year, that one might attribute a large dose of impish irony to McDougall in the act of naming. Further elucidation? You got it.

His work is for the most part, over to the man himself: “an expression of the cadence of personal experiences acquired somewhere between the mundane quotidian grind and weekend forays into the more majestic Australian landscape (South East Queensland).” Nice one, James. So how does it sound and is it any good, you post-Occamites will be wondering.

First, tantalisingly, some publishing notes: Resting Bell is a netlabel, founded by Christian Roth, whose mission statement has it that “The presented music should be meditative, experimental, electric, peaceful, beautiful, exciting, acoustic or grounding. It could be nearly anything.” So, an alluring carte blanche offered to questing composers such as McDougall, whose stock-in-trade, over to our sponsor: “combines a careful balance of processed field recordings, reconstructed pilferings from vinyl, CD, old tapes, studio recordings, contact mics, shortwave radio etc., which is finalized into structured multi-track compositions.” In short, his Sub Routine seems so much an affair of swimming in an ocean awash with a plethora of sounding objects, it occurs that Entia Non seems very much about necessary multiplications of entities rather than the Occamite opposite. Mischief abounds.

And McDougall has previous form, with two releases on the prolific Belgian electronica label, U-cover, even a cursory listen revealing that Entia Non is all about the commingling of all manner of field recorded flotsam - be it rustle, whistle, hiss, crackle, hum, clatter, gibber, chime – invariably suspended in some other minimal synthetic harmonised element. And, though as a concept this approach is by no means a hic sunt leones of unexplored territory, being already the modus of a number of experimental ambienteer’ operandi, McDougall shows that he’s no neophyte. Indeed, he has clearly grasped and enacted Eno’s Principle (or The First Law of Ambient Essentialism – for original source, see Eno [1982]) On Land, which states (apocryphally): when a resonant synthesizer fragment is placed in a suspension of reverberant space, and the noise of something flapping, clanking or puttering is added, extreme ambience results. Now, it’s not nearly so simple as this suggests, for not everyone is possessed of the kind of well-tuned ear and audio-aesthetic sensibility to enable the felicitous juxtaposition of the minimal musical (drones) and the everyday ordinary (field recordings) in such a way as to make them sound inveterate bedfellows, but Sub Routine, more so than anything else so far bearing the Entia Non brand, shows that he is thus endowed.

The 16-minute “Pieces of eight and dubloons” illustrates this perfectly, with its opening of iridescent swathes of Kompakt-ed and Kranky-ed dronewash and chord-candy hosting periodic incursions of Spekk-led sampledelia, then yielding to silence and firecrackle, space and twine. Mine is not to reason why, nor indeed to minutely describe in track-by-track adjectival and adverbial straining, but rather to comment broad-brush fashion. So let it be recorded that this quartet of Entia Non pieces form a genuinely transportive audio document that functions as dream device - as an agent facilitating non-moving travel via your own headspace airlines, or equally as background tint to configure an environment for lubrication of other everyday mechanical and mental motions. Sub Routine seems to lie in the musique concrète and aleatory traditions of Schaefer/Henry and Cage/Fluxus, but retooled for post-digital electro-niks (sans beat-), and as such those into the more abstract end of microsonic electronica, and artists/labels such as Lawrence English (Room40), the plunderphonically-inclined (esp. Philip Jeck and Janek Schaefer), and the minimal drone’n’space of Yann Novak and associates on Dragons Eye, will likely find much to admire in Sub Routine’s melding of fluttering electronics with the contents of his schizophonic Pandora’s box.

Grade: B

Album: www.restingbell.net - free download.