Calx is a form of powdery metallic oxide which is formed when an ore is heated. There are four types: red, blue, yellow and green. Over the course of his career, Richard D.James has created a track for each different variety. In my opinion, Green Calx is marginally ahead of Yellow Calx as the best of them and is by some considerable distance, the most interesting of the Calx tracks; not least because it takes the listener to several different places during its six-minute run-time, whereas the others remain locked in one tempo throughout (fast and urgent for Yellow Calx, slow and mournful for both Red and Blue).
What also distinguishes Green Calx from its partners is that it feels like a track which reflects its creator’s roots. James’s father was a former tin miner and having grown up in Lanner, close to the Redruth mining district, Green Calx has the sound of mining imbued into its very being and pulls off a neat piece of historical and contemporary evocation. The heavily industrial feel of its opening movement places the listener directly into a 19th Century mining environment as the digging/drilling takes place and the mine shafts resonate with excited conversation, banter and grumbling, as only the Cornish can do. Here and there (1:48 and 3:48 particularly), you’ll hear what sounds like a foghorn blasting out to signify breaks for lunch or the end of the working day. Interestingly those blasts appear to have been sampled from some of the adverts in RoboCop which if you’re trying to create a chronology for the recording of tracks on Selected Ambient Works 85-92 places it after 1987/88.
However, the ambient synth sounds which underpin the track and give it a sense of musicality and poignancy, bring us into the late 20th Century and have us walking around the derelict mining sites, as captured in the Redruth mining district link above. We hear the ghosts of one of Cornwall’s great, lost industries, preserved in aural sepia. To have placed these side-by-side within the track allows us both to lament what has been lost, but also admire what was achieved: a world leading industry at the foot of the British Isles.
Video courtesy of eternius
No comments:
Post a Comment