Review: [something's happening] – Buzz

RELEASED ON FLAMING PINES.

Initially, everything is inside out. The first sound we hear is a firework display situated at the centre. Gradually, the sound of an interior fades up to the left and right: someone fumbling a handful of wooden blocks within an empty space. There’s an incredible moment when the “BANG” of a firework aligns perfectly with a nondescript “crack” from the interior field recording. Briefly both spaces feel causally linked. Are we indoors when we should be outside? Or vice versa? “Somewhere near the centre of France an event was cancelled”, explains the text accompanying Buzz. The album carries us through various spaces: crouched in large rooms as birdsong spills through an open window; our head pressed against a broken air conditioning unit; stood beneath the drone of passing planes. All of these spaces are mere waiting rooms. The event was cancelled, and that leaves us feeling nomadic. Our evening is released back to us and we’re not quite ready to accept it, still picking up the pieces of our broken schedule. 

Each time the duo guide me to a new space, I immediately wonder whether I’m supposed to be there. A smartphone alarm rings out on “Hold”, the appearance of which doesn't appear to change anything. Perhaps it's a residue of our initial plans; a reminder of when we would have left, had the event still been running. There’s a wonderful moment on “Turn” – which is predominantly the sound of cicadas in song – when a voice whispers “so, what are we doing?” The speaker sounds flustered, embarrassed perhaps, by the experience of loitering in the dark with no discernible purpose. It’s reminiscent of trying to find an obscure venue in the middle of nowhere, taking turns onto ever-smaller paths, then off the path entirely. The event was supposed to start 40 minutes ago, and there’s still no sign of an event. “Maybe a lot of people gave up, because they thought it was going to be postponed?” Colomb queries on “Stall”, the voice perched above the slow trudging of boots in loose gravel. So wait – has the event been cancelled or not? What’s the plan?

Even when the spoken passages on Buzz suggest that we've arrived at the event (“the others got there early; we can sit on the side, on this wooden bit”), Colomb’s voice is detached, as if reading words originally spoken by another. It’s possibly a transcript from someone else who attended, once again pointing to a happening that occurred elsewhere, in our absence. So much of the “field recording” on the record is an assortment of creaks and cracks – loose floorboards, old chairs, the output of people shuffling in their seats, pacing back and forth, unable to get comfortable in the knowledge that we shouldn’t be here, that we should be there, and maybe it’s already happening now, or it has happened and we weren’t there. We await further information. “Nothing yet,” they say.