“This work’s namesake is a coal mining pit in Bohemia turned into a museum. The ghosts of Mayrau still hang in the changing room, where the workers’ street clothes were hung high above the floor to serve as a visible sign that their uniformed selves were still down in the pit. The chain and pulley system has grown rusty, and its squeaks have become one of the voices in this piece.”
Mayrau is a 3″-length electroacoustic piece that examines the sonic ecology of the Mayrau Mining Museum in Vinařice, Czechia. One of six new “filecast” entries in the ever-expanding catalog of Lloyd Dunn’s multimedia project nula.cc (both an alias and a URL), it might be my favorite release so far. The descriptive text reprinted above explicitly introduces a paranormal aspect, which is then explored further in the actual music; the scrapes and shrieks of the time-gnawed pulleys soar and then fade in a sweeping expanse of darkness, conjuring a haunting atmosphere that lingers long after the track is over. The composition is built upon field recordings that are both presented in original raw form and digitally processed into shifting shards that contort and complicate the soundscape, reaching toward and occasionally coaxing out the intangible currents of a location marked by hardship and pain. Mayrau is an excellent example of interpretive phonography in how it both depicts and deconstructs the physical environment, achieving a rare strain of hypnosis with its carefully sculpted industrial churn and paranoia-inducing signs of human presence like voices and applause. “Rich” is a word that keeps coming to mind… there is so much detail here, the kind that rewards any level of engagement, whether one just puts it on in the background or listens closely for a deeper investigation of how much of a place can really be preserved, and what that “preservation” does (or doesn’t do) to the things people leave behind.
Noise Not Music 