[something’s happening] “a map has always been an attempt” cassette (Strategic Tape Reserve)

On “a map has always been an attempt”, a new album from [something’s happening], Iris Colomb (poet) and Daryl Worthington (musician) construct twelve delicate, shape-shifting pieces of found text and electro-acoustic sound which captivate and bewilder. Each track is an excerpt of audio from one of three live performances from 2022. These involved Colomb picking out small fragments of text from books and using these to improvise new poetic constructions which were then morphed and warped through effects, while Worthington uses guitar, electronics, drum machines and a host of acoustic instruments and non-instruments. For “A map has always been an attempt”, recordings of these live gigs were cut up and the excerpts montaged into a new constellation – the twelve tracks on the album – drawing out and giving structure to the resonances and patterns which emerged from the three improvised performances. As a result, the pieces retain the raw immediacy and sense of possibility of a live performance, but carry the structure and feeling of progression of composed music. Each track is assembled from layers of unsynced loops which flow through each other in an exploration of subtly shifting permutation and texture, and as each new layer is introduced, the shape of the track takes on surprising new dimensions. For the listener, the effect is somehow both hypnotic and destablilizing, the ever-shifting landscape in a sublime, new sonic space.