"Emmanuel Mieville’s field recordings are some of the purest, most thought-provoking around. Rarely manipulated and often left to drift out to their natural conclusions, his sonic snippets of Asian life – most strikingly presented on last year’s Four Wanderings In Tropical Lands – collide city with country, ancient religion with modern consumerism and the innocence of nature with crushing man-made metals.
The questions raised by Mieville are deep and often uncomfortable. For his new CD on the Russian Obs label (previously Observatory Records and then Observatoire), he visited funerals (I take the album’s dedications to be to the deceased) and various other Hindu and Buddhist ceremonies to create an album that begins in a burst of noise and settles slowly into ticking, screeching and ever-changing series of sounds in which the unpredictability of nature is pitted against the clockwork and often unpleasant rhythms of our own making.
What the Buddha would think of ‘Nyorai’ is anyone’s guess. The track’s title – a Japanese translation of the Sanskrit ‘Tathāgata’ that signifies the highest level of Buddhist enlightenment and transcendence – would suggest peace, but the opening ten minutes are given over to ear piercing blasts of noise, scraps of metal and squeaking wooden contraptions. The chanting comes right at the end and lasts only a few seconds – the path to enlightenment is evidently a long and painful process. ‘Batucave’ is a more typical Mieville recording, with heavy rain dropping as cockerels crow, insects crackle and prayer can be heard in the distance. Batu Caves is a Malaysian cave system-cum-shrine network where a great golden deity towers over visitors, monkeys roam free and Hindu festivals take place. Mieville presents it fairly straight – the rain falls in great streams from the caves’ stalactites, the sound of opportunistic locals hawking their cheap religious tat to tourists echoes in the air and the odd genuine chant of prayer goes up.
Mieville continues to ask serious questions about religion. During Four Wanderings the playful laughter of children was abruptly brought to an end by the necessity to attend evening prayer, and here he surrounds it either with unbearable noise or the wails of commerce. On ‘Peikang Matsu’, recorded in a Taiwanese temple, it sounds as though serious renovation work is taking place. The grind of electronic equipment is so loud to begin with as to drown everything else out. There is no sign of other life – worship would be impossible with this going on – so one imagines the temple clogging with stone dust. Some heaven, this. Visitors do eventually enter – loudly, through what sounds like turnstiles – and when you emerge onto the street into the sound of traffic the effect is positively cleansing.
Finally ‘Taisi Funeral’, recorded in a resolutely old-fashioned Taiwanese township. The gleaming opening gives way to chants and the repetitive clack of hollow wooden blocks being struck. For once you sense Mieville is standing back respectfully. His main contribution is the introduction of a series of bright, airy tones that hover above the funeral proceedings like wisps of aether preparing to receive the soul of the deceased. There is no obvious cynicism present and it ends the album on an intriguingly ambiguous note. It’s as though, presented with religion’s true worth – the hope, the comfort in belief – Mieville has been forced to acknowledge what it brings to the people of a region relatively untouched by the heaving belly and gnashing jaws of consumerism. His beef here isn’t with religion per se; more with the corporate, money-grabbing opportunism that sullies its purity on a mass scale."
Steve Dewhurst