When I asked Bob Pulinski about this release, he simply said, “The fan had to be recorded.”
There are times and places for field recordings captured with the utmost fidelity and the least human presence possible. But as I’ve become a more curmudgeonly listener, I find less value in them as standalone music. Internal Electric Fan is the glorious opposite. It distills the practice to its most basic essence: not only the sharing of a sound, but the process of doing so. There is no editing; we hear the activating of the recorder, the scrabbling as it is moved into place, and the turning on of the fan itself. And what a fan it is. Far too noisy for any appliance that could fit in a “room at the electronics store,” a heavy current of hot air over the unmistakable hum and warble of a cheap noisy motor. It had to be recorded. But other things remind us of the room around it. There’s shuffle as Pulinski (I think) sidles over to sit and listen, creaking doors and more movement in the background (or foreground?), a dog (??) jangles its collar. The fan quiets down a bit eightish minutes into “Fan #1” (or does it?). The overall length tells us something too. It takes exactly this long to truly understand the fan, and perhaps even the room that it’s in. Get to the end, and the payoff is sublime—exactly what you think will happen happens, but you could never have predicted it would happen the way it happens. Intimate and beautifully boring, as it should be. Pulinski has the answers. He is sitting in a room (at the electronics store) different from the one you are in now. He is recording the internal electric fan.
Copies (only $7) are available via email: jan95cdrs@gmail.com.
Noise Not Music 