Tarab - From the dark side of found sound

A concrete composer, sound poet, experimenter and even a lecturer at sound-design seminars. Apart from various degrees in artistic-musical studies, almost nothing is known about the background of Eamon Sprod, a native of Melbourne, Australia, his influences, or the research that led him to launch the Tarab project.

As early as 2001 he began probing and sampling, drawn to the most unexplored stretches of his native Australia, the sounds that would become part of his first, already ambitious concrete poem, "Surface" (2004). There, as well as in "Iron, Leaf" and the arcane "Bottle", collected on his debut long-playing album Surfacedrift, the alternation between natural sounds and electronic substrates unfolds in alternating, undulating phases that always tend toward stasis, with no particular compositional ambition. Sprod only partially reworks the sampled material, preferring to merely streak the surface of nature's backdrops - an ecosystem of animals and insects, wind creaking through abandoned houses, the drizzle of fountains scattered through the woods, a storm rattling scrap metal - yet still ending up probing an invisible grief.

The first live reconstructions of these soundscapes, over the following two years, earned him a spot at 23five Incorporated, a non-profit organization devoted to enlisting young sound researchers. In 2007 he thus completed another concept work reaffirming his post-naturalist approach, Wind Keeps Even Dust Away, a five-track album whose titles together form the sentence of the piece, a kind of fractured title track. From the sonata for breezes and storms of "Wind" we move to the mysterious calm of "Keeps", for the first time featuring an explicit electronic drone, to the landscape of insects and crows of "Even", to the downpours of "Dust". The closing "Away", meanwhile, veers into a concert of pure industrial noise in the vein of Einsturzende Neubauten, paired with a heavy ambient oscillation.

It is precisely from here that the monumental "Take All The Ships From The Harbour And Sail Them Straight Into Hell" takes off, recorded in 2008 around Angel Island (San Francisco) and later included on the self-titled album from 2009, built from unsettling metallic rumbles - often at a near-whisper - responsible for an atmosphere both sparse and suffocating at once. It's the tour de force that fully realizes his highly variable approach to sound, and moreover places him alongside the great concrete poems of the past, from Varese to Xenakis. Screeches, windy trails, radiations sound like voices in the void emerging at various heights, in a prehistoric industrial sound that derails into ambient abstraction.

Two minor releases follow: a split with the seasoned Eric La Casa from 2010, yielding the 10-minute "Utility", by far his piece most conceived as a collage, and the brief Acquiescence (2011). As with Wind Keeps Even Dust Away, of which it indeed seems the logical sonic continuation, in Acquiescence too the titles of the individual tracks spell out the title of the work: thus "Acqu", "Iesc" and "Ence" are the three new studies probing natural sounds through brutal, abrasive electronic outbursts.

In 2012 Sprod put together Shards Of Splinters-Fragments Of Sketches/Killustiku Killud-Kriimude Killud, a collection of three untitled medium-length tracks, in which he once again approaches industrial abstraction, steeping it, as is now his seasoned custom, in soundscapes that are ever more oppressive, sparse and static, detached from any vital stimuli. The over half-hour-long "Strata", included on Strata (2013), is then his most airy creation and, true to its title, positively stratospheric, with some of the most violent zones of chaos in his career interspersed with seething near-silences.

These works in some way push his research to its extreme. The composer returns to record for 23five with renewed maturity, not only musical and anti-musical, but also, in a sense, "visual" and cinematic. The relatively brief and intense five parts of I'm Lost (2014) are thus among Sprod's sharpest creations (as is the 21-minute "Nettle Daughter", available only via Soundcloud), set firmly within an industrial ambient terrain, driven by a mood more hostile than ever, leaden environments, and an excellent command of the historic techniques of the avant-garde.

The musique concrete promulgated in 1948 by Pierre Schaeffer, the theorist, and carried on by Pierre Henry, the virtuoso, sought to replace the increasingly planned abstraction of serial music with a new spontaneity drawn from noises without harmonic pitch, the sounds of everyday life. The advanced use of recording techniques then altered these sounds to achieve musical effects. Another pupil of this school, Bernard Parmegiani, while starting from these same premises, sought to deepen the compositional aspect, pushing the source sounds to their extreme.

Eamon Sprod's work can be regarded as one of the possible terminal phases of this countertrend. Little to no variation is applied in the studio to the nature of the sounds; the composer prefers to intervene directly on site during recording, using unorthodox "instruments" (such as rusty funnels, metal rasps, tin containers, etc.) that amplify the intimate sensations of a landscape. These, in essence, are Sprod's compositional stages, somewhere between a laboratory chemist and a land-art performer: capturing the subliminal level of a space - almost always wild, empty, grating, hostile - then isolating it, amplifying it, and only as a final step layering it with subsequent samples.

Unlike Schaeffer's very earliest intentions, in the concrete poems released under the Tarab name - which descend instead from Wendy Carlos's "Sonic Seasonings" and stand in comparison with contemporaries like Israel Martinez - a highly calculated abstraction once again takes precedence over spontaneous sonic description. This reversal also aims to invert the idyll of nature: his are scenarios that have very little that is natural about them, and even less that is reassuring. They are powerful, vast canvases that proceed through subliminal insertions, teeming stratifications, mysterious emanations and unidentified found sound, often placing above everything a deafening distortion through which - always without the slightest theatricality - an inextinguishable, dark, grey anguish takes shape. As if Montale's epitaphs had found the sonic translation of "mal de vivre".

New poems include "Gleaners" (2016), 31 minutes, the latest standard of his jagged, violent and discontinuous calligraphy, "Idée Fixe" (2016), 23 minutes, a collage of fragments gathered over the years and in the most disparate places, and "Notebook: Carbon/Soda" (2017), 14 minutes, one of his most silent and rarefied pieces, included on the collective anthology VIII (2017) curated by Aposiopese, the French label devoted to acousmatic research.

"An Incomplete Yet Fixed Idea", in two parts, is included on An Incomplete Yet Fixed Idea (2017), again for Aposiopese.

Sprod also took part in the short film "Transduction Twentyfifteen" (2017) curated by John Grzinich, alongside Simon Whetham, Jim Haynes, Rostislav Rekuta, Dawn Scarfe, Tuulikki Bartosik, Fernando Godoy and Yiorgis Sakellariou, an excellent audiovisual collective showcase of the new generation of field recording artists.

OBEX (2018) is a split cassette with Slavek Kwi, aka Artificial Memory Trace, featuring the 10-minute "Transform 1".

Sprod then decided to found his own label, Sonic Rubbish, to guarantee himself maximum creative freedom. The first release is Housekeeping (2018), one of his most thunderous, ambitious (38 minutes in two parts) and fully realized inorganic collages.

Apophenia (2020), on the other hand, sits almost at the opposite end of the spectrum: seven short untitled sketches often built on rarefied, subliminal timbral fragments, especially the seventh, a 12-minute piece bordering on absolute silence.

Consistently following on is the five-part Holes (2021), recorded during the Covid-19 lockdown — one of the pandemic-era works most concretely shaped by that very pandemic, by the sense of claustrophobia and isolation it brought with it: for the first time, Sprod samples not natural settings or disused buildings but the four walls of his own home. The resulting atmosphere carries a whiff of skeletal, mechanical desolation.

From these in turn come the eight Rooms (2022), in which Sprod becomes a cut-and-paste editor of footstep fragments, clattering objects, rumbles and murky silences. Adopting the stance of the avant-garde composer, or rather the concrete poet, allows him to confirm the shift from the dark contemplation of nature of his early work to his current urban neurosis.

Material Studies #1 (2020) and Material Studies #2 + #3 (2023) offer reworkings of his old, still-unused tapes.

Foil Void Join Avoid (2026), his first work released under his own name, Eamon Sprod, contains five imposing mixed-media panels (two "Foil Avoid" and three "Join Avoid").

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