Eric La Casa

Is this research, documentary, or sound art? For air.ratio, phonographer Eric La Casa focuses on ventilation systems. Ominous and ubiquitous in our lives, especially in public buildings, mechanical air distribution systems generate noise we have all grown accustomed to. La Casa sticks a microphone up close to various parts of Parisian public buildings' ventilation systems (ducts, registers, plenums, and air vents) to capture the details of their songs and highlight a range of tones, textures, and colors that largely go unnoticed. The field recordist could have turned these raw materials into an immersive, carefully mixed sound art piece (his "Les Pierres du Seuil" series of compositions show a sharp musique concrète talent), but instead he opted for a "raw data" approach. The album consists of 30 two-minute tracks, each one presenting a different recording. There is no crossfading or any other attempt to merge the recordings -- every 120 seconds, the sound abruptly changes and that's that. This sequence of 30 tracks is bookended by two "Calibration" pieces that are similarly crude collages of two-second snippets from each recording (30 x 2 = 60 seconds flat). And the album ends with a minute of silence to see if, after studying air ducts under the microscope for an hour, listeners can tune back their ears to their own ventilation systems. Air.ratio provides an interesting data bank for ambient and experimental soundsmiths, and it does make the casual listeners more aware of their surroundings, but it lacks an interpretive dimension to make it worthy of repeated listening. In other words, the catalog format is disappointing, something that cannot be fixed by simply putting the CD player on random mode. ~ François Couture, All Music Guide