Sharon Gal - The Garden of Earthly Delight

  by Adrian Janes

published: 25 / 9 / 2018

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Review

I entered this garden knowing only that Sharon Gal describes her work as “sound art” rather than music, and unaware of this being anything but another way of describing what music is. On the evidence of this album, there is enough of a melodic element to make it fall within the sphere of ambient music, but her extensive use of samples of birdsong and the chatter of monkeys also tips it beyond conventional musical discipline. I can’t say that this mixture always appeals. ‘Speak and Spells’ opens the album with what sounds like the long chimes of a meditation bell ringing into silence. A treated voice wordlessly adds a note of mournful beauty. But the spell is then broken by either a bird’s chatter or a person chattering to a bird – perhaps this clash of moods is meant to suggest the impossibility of real communication between humans and birds, even as we like to humanise their calls as ‘song’. This same ironic lack of inter-species harmony also comes across in the following two tracks. In ‘Forest Song’, a high keyboard note seems to melt into a vocal and then back again, and pushes up and around in the mix in contrast to agitated treated squawking, while the vocals of ‘Three’ have a quiet calmness which seems denied to an often frantic-sounding bird. ‘Dance of the Sirens’ is the most musically satisfying track. It moves from tentative synth to long, almost choral notes, establishing a repetitive but calming phrase, like a less commercial Eno. Slowly a more abrasive texture seeps through, and sustained layers of sound, with a voice ebbing in and out, build up to create an ending that is icily moving. It was listening to the natural sounds in her own garden which put Gal in mind of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’. (Since this depicts Heaven, Earth and Hell, you fleetingly wonder what her neighbours are like.) Soothing birdsong, evoking the mood of Pink Floyd’s ‘Cirrus Minor’, is at first interspersed with background talking and what seems to be the clatter of cutlery. From this domestic setting it’s succeeded by a quasi-Gregorian chanting, all the more moving in its deep human yearning by contrast with the simple call and response between two birds. This album seems to suggest we are constituted to seek musicality in the sounds around us, something which makes emotional and melodic sense even from sources that in themselves are following no human rules. If it’s an uneven experiment, there are still passages that are worth the concentration demanded, especially in the last two tracks. Perhaps, in blending the sounds she makes with those she finds, what Gal is asking the listener to do above all is simply that – listen.

Track Listing:-

1 speak and spells
2 forest song
3 three
4 dance of the sirens
5 in the garden of earthly delights