“Chance aka aleatoric methods have been such a familiar reference point for musicians of the last 80 odd years that the album title post-chance (selected by Erstwhile producer Jon Abbey) seems a bold declaration of some brave new compositional philosophy to come. But post here likely alludes to the more prosaic process of sending packages back and forth. These two European experimental tape composers incorporated the mail service into their collaboration to underline and aestheticise the distance between the pair, and the spanner in the works, the element of chance, was a magnet: thrown into each mail package, it randomly destroyed and degraded the sounds they were exchanging.
Back in the days of the Black Ark, Lee Perry was known to mess with sounds on his master tapes by subjecting them to ganja smoke, burial, even urination. A similarly impish spirit enlivens post-chance, and the results are just as haunted. One stereo channel carries original sounds selected by one of the pair, and the other is apparently audio salvaged from the mail. The process of degradation makes melodies echo and circle back throughout the 50-minute length of the piece. The piece begins with a wobbling low-end frequency moving wraith-like from channel to channel, an effect almost like a doubled vocal from a vintage rock band. At 25 minutes, a simple piece of a cappella singing duplicates into a tremulous thread of theremin-like pure distortion. The album is like all the most elusive and ingenious tricks of analogue tape manipulation brought together in a showcase of studio sleight of hand.”
Derek Walmsley, The Wire magazine, February, 2024
“A fascinating collaboration that plays like listening to a conversation already fading from memory. The shifts in timbre and texture are a welcoming jolt—you can discern the interplay between Baron and Vernon as recordings are deployed, panned, and distorted to turn into something more wraith-like. While there’s darkness to be found in post-chance, it’s not pervasive. This recollection becomes one of intrigue: a choir of spirits released from quarter-inch tape.”
Jibril Yassin, Tone Glow
“…what post-chance made me do is reconsider sound not for what it contains or achieves, but for the very simple fact that its constituent parts are irrefutably entangled. That’s maybe the best way to understand if a person is meaningful, right? When our lives feel so enmeshed with theirs? There is a sense of completeness and vitality to that bond, and to get that same exact feeling from an album—one constructed by two people who had never met—does feel like something beyond serendipity, beyond chance.”
Joshua Minsoo Kim, Tone Glow
“In 2024, Erstwhile celebrates its 25th birthday. The label’s first release in this special year is a collaboration between Marc Baron and Mark Vernon, two artists that had not met before working on the aptly named Post-Chance. The disc aligns with the bulk of the Erstwhile catalog both for its methods of production and for the sounds and silences comprising its execution.
Without completely rehashing the duo’s description of the complex process of mailing, copying, and editing materials, the album is meant to consider and document loss. In the hands of these two radical musicians, that means a precis of loss, of decay, to engage and highlight the processes behind what is missing. Over the course of more than a year, the two musicians mailed tape fragments back and forth with a magnet in each package, purposely placed to facilitate a random decay. Both originals and the decayed copies made it into sections of the final mix. An hour was then distilled from these virtual collaborations.
From the first sounds comprising the many vignettes giving this hour-long dialogue its contour, there is a warmth to the music as it unfolds along its choppy and unpredictable path. Even the sustains ending at 3:39 resonate with a luminous analogue glow, a kind of respite from the previous hiss and crackle’s tension but also anticipating the succeeding silence punctuated by what sound like disembodied bits of dulcimer. Disembodied but not de-environmentalized, because each of the sounds in play brings its surroundings along for the dream-like episodic ride, like the large space inhabiting the soundstage from 6:11-6:45 or the presumably sped-up voices that live in a much smaller room, dialogue in snarky miniature and then blink out of existence at 16:51. It seems, and this is only the case in certain instances, as if the right channel contains the decaying tape while the left the more pristine original, as with the garbled rumble-and-squeak episode at 31:39.
Technology is at the heart of the whole affair, very consciously at certain points as discussion of the process takes center stage, even though it is located in the left channel. The whole begins with a sudden plunge into tape fuzz, and various types of analogue silence provide a throughline as the musical events unfold. Some bits conjure shades of Keith Rowe’s pristine and near-silent infatuation with the static grindings and scrapings of every-day objects in the stark relief afforded by contact microphones, while other moments channel the same common-place forces through the gritty reality checks laced with fantasy that Vanessa Rossetto might offer. The silences bring Wandelweiser composers to mind, but the humorous approach to technology might tickle the fancy of Michael Pisaro-Liu in his Revolution Shuffle mode. Through it all run the unpredictable strains of instruments, home-life and environmental bait and switch that defines so much of Graham Lambkin’s work, whether solo or in collaboration with Rowe or Jason Lescaleet.
As with so many Erstwhile releases, the album defies any one category or aesthetic. This is an extremely clever collaboration. The “post” in the title is revealing. The music is both indicative of Musique Concrete’s whimsical aftermath and a deeper and more earthy concept emerging in aleatory’s ubiquitous wake, but the relationship is also more personal. It’s as much an indicator of the Baron/Vernon duo’s intrepid approach as it is of Erstwhile’s Jon Abbey’s penchant for giving them a space to unleash their collaborative vision. Just as Baron and Vernon’s music seems to settle into a physicality, drone or multileveled rhythmic intrigue, the carpet is pulled from underfoot leaving room for the next episode to begin. Any overarching terminological concerns are jettisoned in favor of an approach knowing no laws but its own. Long may the process continue.”
Marc Medwin, Point of Departure
“Mark Vernon is a Glasgow-based sound and radio artist whose practice is focused upon concepts of audio archaeology, magnetic memory and nostalgia.
Marc Baron is an experimental French artist that composes music for loudspeakers using tapes and analog processes. This work takes the shape of acousmatics concerts, radio broadcast, records, installations or specific live performances.
‘post-chance’ is their collaboration album – an abstract sound project comprised of unspooled open reel tape fragments that both artists sent back and forth to each other over the course of a year.
The album consists of one longform track, which begins with an ambient bed of fragile tape hiss, with some indistinguishable stirrings and movements emerging from it, making it come alive. Soon afterwards you will hear layers of deep swelling drones that sound like a lo-fi recording of a brass instrument. Once this fades away, you will hear a clattering cacophony of steel bell-like sounds, followed by more faint, distant, resonant bells…
Throughout the rest of the piece, you will hear fragments of warped choral music, decaying tape hiss, snippets of distant conversations, bustling crowds, ghostly voices, audio pops, booming bursts of distortion, bizarre sonic abstractions, frantic clacking noises, outdoor environmental ambience, ticking clocks, squealing whistles, demented tape manipulations, wailing sirens, weather sounds, eerie vibrations, atonal drones, distant bangs and other miscellaneous collaged sounds – all punctuated by peaceful quiet segments of near silence.
‘post-chance’ is a mysterious and mesmerizing album of abstract audio collaging, broken tape samples, ambiguous drones, lo-fi noise art and eerie sound phenomena. You can tell that this album is a labour of passion and love from both of these artists. They’re constantly treading on new and unpredictable sonic territories, never lingering for long on any one segment… which makes for a strange, enticing and immersive listening experience.”
Fletina, Audio Crackle
