If you can survive the first three minutes of the epic Lift with Your Knees, the first half of Coin Gutter’s All your dreams are meaningless, then the rest of the 36-minute opener is a much more pleasant experience. Coin Gutter are one of the new “landscape” groups to be coming out of Western Canada and their style of musique concrète is intended to capture their impressions of the physical landscapes of their environments. Songs about the air and sky and rocks and soil, when you get right down to it. What you hear are tracks which encompass the drone of subtle winds, the chirping song of fields of insects, and the tumultuous grating of rock against stone.
Formed in February 2000 by Emma Hendrix and Graeme Scott, Coin Gutter had released several self-produced CD-Rs before All your dreams are meaningless. The nine tracks here move like weather across unstructured plains — sometimes the wind is kind and gentle, other times it is harsh and cold. The landscape is beautiful and ripe in the spring, empty and jagged in the winter. Lift with Your Knees charts a year in the wilderness, a slow time-lapse recording of the passage of time. The rest of the tracks build off the theme of the opener; some are more chaotic, some less so.
The standout track is Lullaby, a song for a musique concrète child. It is a beautiful piano and soprano duet with jets of digital noise and CD artifacts. I love how it starts with these swelling drones like movements of rock under great pressure before being smashed under a brief deluge of white noise. In the aftermath, the piano begins. The operatic voice glides in and is completely tripped up by skips and cut-ups, the vocal line hiccupping and stuttering for a few seconds before settling down. The duet continues — piano and voice — and the bit signal mash up and the bleats of noise pursues the pair, threatening and snapping at them. There is a final chaotic moment where the piano is possessed by the sound of the static bomb and becomes a carnival organ for a few seconds and then all the avant garde elements slink away and we drift out with just two traditional instruments again.
All your dreams are meaningless isn’t necessarily easy listening. The opening of Lift with Your Knees is a howling storm of noise and the final minute of Southern Yukon / Northern BC (perhaps parts of Alaska) is just as abrasive. In between there are laments and drones and wistful landscapes. But, like all adventures out in the wilderness, you’ve got to keep an eye out for falling rocks. Keeping an eye on the sky (or, in this case, a hand near the volume knob) keeps you slightly on edge and Coin Gutter’s work asks that you not nod off while listening. It’s kind of like having the timpani player hurl a mallet at you during the adagio movement of the symphony when you start to doze.
