‘(…) so I started letting the minidisk [and the dat] roll (…). I left them recording when going for a coffee, when finding a good soundspot outdoors or stumbling across those low and gentle electrical hums and hisses. None of the sounds were played.’
‘Suave Siesta’ is a release with environmental recordings from Agadir (Morocco) and Arguineguin and San Fernando (Spain). Although these locations are specifically mentioned in the cd-booklet, the record might as well have been recorded in Almere, The Netherlands or in Tsjernobyl, Ukraine. The sound-collage has no specific ethnic sounds involved.
I am open-minded, I really am. I listen to stuff that 99% of the world-population will describe as meaningless noise or just as garbage, and I love it. I probably listen to much of the same music you listen to. But not every compilation of click, hiss and strange sounds is appealing to me.
In this case, we have environmental recordings that are quite dull, pretty minimal and overall unattractive. There is some structure in the songs, but very often this structure is abandoned after a while. The artist himself calls his music ‘audiopolaroids’, or ‘neutral sound paintings’. That is exactly what in my eyes is wrong with this record: these are unplayed recordings of ordinary, everyday life. It is cut-up though, and put in a different order, but I’m not really interested in the artists vacation, nor do I like neutralness, without emotion or atmosphere. I’m sure Tore Honoré Bøe knows how to create fascinating electronic soundscapes, but this effort is too minimal and too microscopical.
