Another artist whose practise revolves around the chutes and stops of hand-made organs and other makeshift wind instruments, the Edinburgh-born and Vilnius-based composer Sholto Dobie has been a fixture on the experimental margins over the past decade, from an ethnographic preservation of khroniky alongside Lucia Nimcová across a series of visits to Rusyn villages in the Carpathian mountains to dadaist collaborations with Shakeeb Abu Hamdan and Mark Harwood and performances at such venues as Café OTO, Les Ateliers Claus and the Fyklingen festival of new music. Mining the absurd with an improvisational flair and a keen attention to the contours of local detail, his patchwork of compressed air, reeds and flutes, timers and variegated field recordings finds a home on Infant Tree, with the record 23 officially his debut solo album.
Attaching an air pump to a series of reeded and metal pipes culled from organs, bagpipes and the Laotian khene, a contraption which is brought to life by an interrelated system of timer modules, valves and swinging microphones, Dobie opens 23 with an intrepid and wavelike hiss which gives way to a chorus of bells and rattlesnake percussion. Distended radio chatter and snatches of overhead conversations or didacticism allow ‘Low time’ to segue effortlessly into ‘Forest logic’, which rustles somewhere between canopy and floor as a sine tone drifts in and out of focus amid the prevailing ambiance, before more rattling reeds offer a portal between the organic or natural and urbane or mechanised worlds, sounding by the end of the song like the stalled revving of a motorcycle engine.
Eschewing or perhaps inhabiting its paradoxical title, ‘Ice pancakes’ carries a brassier tone with a pulsating trance-like sine fraying slightly and then flattening around the edges. Sholto Dobie has a knack for blurring the mosslike with the medical or medicinal. ‘Among intersecting breaths’ sounds like a room full of oscillators or typewriters run amok, or else an ultra high-speed game of ping-pong as played by a pair of barely receptive tonsils. So on 23 there are video game divertissements which serve as a prelude to long, breathy, shakuhachi-esque drones, and times where single reeds sprout litanies of bagpipes and organs. After the stately, somber and even somewhat furtive ‘Passages’, the penultimate track ‘High time’ offers a high-pitched drone and breathy swarms over bucolic field recordings, the sound of chirping birds trammelling the sky as night draws its curtain. Then ‘Hot steps’ plays like a pump organ, the toing and froing of the pedals providing a human touch as the suite ends on a yearning and plaintive air.
