Tip! *200 copies limited edition* Eric La Casa's first LP arrives after more than thirty years of uncompromising work in environmental sound. This is the complete soundtrack he created for Luke Fowler's 16mm film A Grammar for Listening Part 2 (2009) - part of the Glasgow filmmaker's celebrated triptych that also featured collaborations with Lee Patterson and Toshiya Tsunoda.
Fowler - winner of the inaugural Derek Jarman Award in 2008, Turner Prize nominee in 2012 - set out to investigate a deceptively simple question: how to create a meaningful dialogue between looking and listening? Western culture has relentlessly attempted to classify noise, music and everyday sounds, yet ordinary noises - the mundane sounds perceived as neither annoying nor musical - remain of no interest. The film cycle addresses this blind spot through the possibilities afforded by 16mm film and digital sound recording.
La Casa has spent over three decades exploring what he calls the "infra-ordinary" - a term borrowed from Georges Perec designating space-time at low intensity, from background noise to the inaudible. He recorded sounds in Paris, its suburbs, and Glasgow throughout 2008. His methodology is distinctive: he consults maps not to locate significant sights but to calculate proximity to traffic noise. The aleatory nature of his routes suggests a drift with the character of an "open investigation".
The result sits at the intersection of musique concrète and field recording, a practice indebted to Pierre Schaeffer's concept of "reduced listening" - sounds perceived in themselves, stripped of instrumental and cultural contexts. Prior to the tendency toward silence in 1960s experimental film, John Cage had foregrounded silence within 4'33", purging concerts of conventional content, allowing sounds from outside to become the focus of attention. These foundational ideas, alongside R. Murray Schafer's "Soundscape" movement, shaped an entire practice. La Casa is one of its most rigorous and poetic practitioners.
This LP edition presents both the original mono soundtrack conceived for Fowler's film and a completely new stereo version realized in 2023 - two distinct paths into the same sonic territory. The tension between grainy 16mm footage and crisp digital audio was always part of the work's conceptual power: a deconstructive process illuminating the complexities of simple everyday occurrences.
