reviews / 2009

TARAB - Take All The Ships From The Harbour And Sail Them Straight To Hell

Name: TARAB – Take All The Ships From The Harbour And Sail Them Straight To Hell
Item: Take All The Ships From The Harbour And Sail Them Straight To Hell
Rating: 7
Author: Michele Saran

2009 (23five inc.)

avant-garde, field recordings

by Michele Saran

A Melbourne-based artist and sound designer, Eamon Sprod (aka Tarab) earned several qualifications in music and the arts before debuting on various experimental electronic compilations between 2005 and 2007. It wasn't until 2009 that he gathered the strength, ambition and stylistic focus to create “Take All The Ships From The Harbour And Sail Them Straight To Hell”, his first major work (released on 23Five Inc., his new community of independent electronic artists).

An hour-long tribute to the musique concrete poems of the past, “Take All The Ships” conjures a sparse yet suffocating atmosphere, fairly removed from the theoretical framework of Varese and Xenakis. Metallic screeches, windy trails, rumbles and radiations sound like voices in the void emerging at various pitches (with a spasmodic use of random crescendos, sudden cuts of sound layers, imperceptible pianissimos, polluted drones). Taken as a whole, the piece comes across as an Residents-esque “Eskimo” now left uninhabited, abandoned to silent, arcane forces.

You can also choose not to believe it, in which case you'll miss out on a journey through possible music (largely sampled in the Angel Island settings, around the San Francisco bay) into a pre-historic industrial sound that veers into abstract ambient. Limited edition of 500 copies.

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10/06/2009

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Michele Saran, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition

Tracklist

1. Take All The Ships From The Harbour And Sail Them Straight To Hell

TARAB online

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Monograph

Tarab

From the dark side of found sound

With his concrete poems of inextinguishable, grey anguish, Australian Eamon "Tarab" Sprod has managed to overturn the premises of historical avant-garde, bringing back into vogue a calculated abstraction that nonetheless feeds on a terrible "mal de vivre", in a hidden sense of existence