Of Zherbin’s work, it is stated that it “ranges from tape looping the sounds of waterfalls to making a racket with DIY electronics and noise shakers”. I found a video where Zherbin, who is based in Finland and since 2009 has been active as a musician, sound artist and instrument builder, indeed stands with his recording machine next to a waterfall capturing the noise and making it sound very weird, and very interesting. The collaboration between Zherbin and the Australian based label NCTMMRN, standing for Nothing Comes To My Mind Right Now is a perfect one. NCTMMRN, which was behind last year’s outstanding self-titled experimental work of sonic imagination by Tottumiskysymys, is dedicated to experimental music and sound art. I and now you have been warned.
The titles of the six pieces reflect different stages of breaking from “Starting to Break” through to “Broken”. That’s logical. The breaking itself is in both the physical and psychological sense. “Starting to Break” suggests that pressure is being applied. The cosmic drone suggests tension in the air. Faint rumblings become more like a heavy industrial process or maybe it’s the sound of rocks falling or piles of rubbish falling down the side of a slope. Let us imagine. Inevitably it’s distorted. Violence is not part of this. Zherbin portrays gradual decay. The industrial process continues with “Slow Break”. The drone at the front wears away at us like a monotone drill, and develops into a quiet throbbing sound as if it is programming something into our feeble human minds, or alternatively just reminding us of a headache. The action starts with “Breaking”. Now pieces are shattering but in an interesting electronic-mechanical way. Have the aliens landed? It sounds as if someone or something is actively doing the breaking, and our mind or a physical object is on the receiving end of it. There is respite courtesy of an intense drone, before the dismantling process starts up again.
The goods and the mind are now damaged. “Break 1” begins like a stylus on an old scratched vinyl, which thinking back to Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity” album, turned into “Geiger Counter”. Or we could be in an actual field, as opposed to a magnetic one, with the wind blowing and a flag flapping. I go for the scientific interpretation. Again, violence is avoided. The destruction and decay are abrasive, as the loop goes round, snapping, crackling and popping in its cosmic-industrial way. The next stage is “Curved Scratches”. My mind by this stage had become divided into images of the physical, so broken glass or metal, or of the human brain. “Curved Scratches” sounds physical. It’s apparent that the path is not straight, perhaps as we navigate across the damaged surface, but eerie and haunting murmurings evoke the human element and play into our fears and nightmares. So maybe our brain does have “curved scratches”. Wouldn’t life be easy if it didn’t? This is powerful imagery. It could be of course that Zherbin just likes to create sounds and is having a laugh here at my expense, but from the videos I’ve seen he seems a serious soul, and in any case I really feel I’m experiencing something here – a mark of my own insanity, perhaps. The end of the production line is “Broken”. The constant noise made me stop and think. If the destruction has happened, and we’re broken, then the electronic drone perhaps is a signal to remind us that there is always an electric field out there even after the damage is done. This field again is of an industrial kind with the sounds of a drill and a mechanical shovel. A bit of oil is needed, I say. The sound waves become louder and more accentuated. “Broken” is a reminder that however fragile or broken we may be, there is a constant force out there. As a final reminder there is a cosmic explosion. It gives the album a climax but somehow the explosion wasn’t in keeping with the gradual degenerative process that I’d been experiencing over the previous 33 minutes.
Some may not like the monotony of this, but I commend Zherbin on his imagination.
What I really like about this is that the listener is allowed the space to transform the sounds into mental images. It’s not extreme. I had watched and listened to some of Zherbin’s series of waterfall loop tapes – worth a look, I suggest – and there the sonic imagery is starker, at times coming over as a cross between the sucking sound of a dental saliva ejector and cosmic interference. Where “Sounds of Breaking” is concerned, I completely got the physical and mental side of the subject. Zherbin communicates very powerfully and very effectively.
Evaluating something like this doesn’t really correspond to something as mundane as marks out of ten but I will follow the formula and do that. It comes down to the individual listener’s appreciation or tolerance of experiments with sound. Yet I didn’t find “Sounds of Breaking” abstract at all. I found that through the experience of Zherbin’s sonic imagery, reality is more present than superficially meets the eye or rather the ear. When all is said and done Zherbin may be brilliant. He may be detached from reality, although I don’t think so. He may be mad. He may be wasting his time. In any case I found his sounds of breaking extremely interesting and thought-provoking.
(8.5/10 Andrew Doherty)
https://www.facebook.com/zherbin
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