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artist: Adrian Shenton |
Adrian Shenton is a UK bass player turned laptop artist, and Houseworks is his 2009 self-released (well, released on his own label) follow-up to his 2008 debut The Measuring of Moments on Quiet World. Shenton categorizes his music broadly as ambient / minimal / experimental, or at least, he does so as per the categorical limitations of a MySpace page. The influences he cites are perhaps more telling, ranging from Boards of Canada and Björk to Erik Satie and Philip Glass. Seemingly grounded in modern electronic music as much as minimalist classical music, the promise of what the album might be gets my hopes up.
Unfortunately, Houseworks seems to fall short of a lot of everything; as an ambient album it’s too little gentle and calm, as a sound experiment it lacks experimental bravado, as an electronic venture it seems too little satisfactory and too slap-dash. I’m most inclined to categorize the album as per the last; insofar as Houseworks can be called ambient, I must say one must be particularly hard-headed (or hard of hearing) to let the sounds wile away quietly in the background. Though occasionally gentle and calm, the sounds more often than not draw your attention, especially where fairly unimpressive everyday sounds are looped ad infinitum. As much goes for tracks such as All the Tea of China and Beating the Bounds (4 Walls), which come off more as rather unexperimental sound experiments, and which annoy this reviewer more than anything else. Yet, even as a further unspecified electronic album it seems there is hardly any attraction in the thing.
Most stringent are the largely absent concordance and consonance; where loops are piled up, it is done with little seeming regard for their interplay, and even if the parts have been selected carefully, the whole becomes a muddled a-rhythmic mess. Besides, the approach itself is too little adventurous, the sounds often too minimally compelling and hardly aesthetically outstanding, barely warranting the product. The soft swelling of layer upon layer is a tried and tested approach, but also a tired one; add to it the pedestrian and seemingly (too) easily conceived sounds (digitally stretched drones, and so on), and it seems little surprising the album is neither wholly convincing nor very satisfying.
Although Houseworks, at least in name, is exactly that, there is little in the works which is truly homely. Perhaps my expectations were off; yet even the more achieved minimalist ambient drones convey a wholly different quality – the sounds are cold and distant, arguably cold-blooded; with their black-toes, subzero character they would have seemed less out of place on any glacial ambient album than on a sounds-of-house work. However, these drones are – to an extent – certainly successful; aesthetically pleasing, even if I’m hard-pressed to like them for anything more than their superficial, polar prettiness. The album stays at all time unimpassioned, and does little to recreate the warm little wonders of everyday. Alas.
Houseworks is certainly not an all-out awful affair; yet it cannot stand out even in the genre midstream. It comes across as the work of a budding artist who has, however, yet to find out what is his sound and what is not, what goes and what doesn’t, and what’s worth slapping on a disc, and what isn’t.
