‘In the middle it sounds like a plane’. This is what I got for using my friend as a litmus test listener for Joanna Bailie’s Symphony-Street-Souvenir. She’s not wrong, though; with a slowness so intense it feels like acceleration, the piece is a flash of disorientation, like something flying overhead at its own indecipherable rate. Written in 2009, Symphony was Bailie’s first ever foray into electronic music. She sampled slice-of-life field recordings from Copenhagen, manipulating them against unfamiliar instrumental timbres and an ever-slowing pitch shift that transitioned for about five minutes. Drawing on the techniques of Italian composer Aldo Clementi to ‘slow down’ her material, Bailie’s piece started like a straight presentation of a certain time – and then became a dramatic distortion of it.
Symphony is like much of Bailie’s recent music: it is beguiling and mind-altering, building up themes of memory and nostalgia, and the frustrating illusions found in our personal history. It sounds a bit like fantasy; fitting, as she once described it as having an element of a ‘science-fiction’ about it. That fantasy, that fiction, is actually history: events of the past are scattered through Bailie’s music, warped like they would be in our attempt to remember them. In building her pieces, Bailie pulls together different bits of perfectly normal material – acoustic instruments, electronic textures and found sound – and gives us malaise.
Perhaps the best example is Artificial Environments, an eight-part song cycle in which Bailie’s dense mix of field recordings span the length of Europe, taking in captured street conversations across the continent. Interspersed with shards of composed music, the piece also inserts a programme note directly into itself, Bailie joining the cast as a spoken word users’ manual that seems to hover above the music. Her voice guides the listener through the process of the piece, explaining certain techniques and introducing the listener to upcoming sounds. It may or may not be the truth – unverified and half-contextualised, Bailie’s words become a further degree of dislocation, a way of weirding the presented realities of the European cities she’s taking us through.
For about a decade, Bailie’s work has been driven by the field recordings she makes, her music sheets accosted by what she’s picked up on the street. Recording dense sounds that are already detailed to the point of arrangement, she has aimed to emphasise what these sounds are expressing. She invites performers to double up on these sounds, to locate their harmonics onto acoustic instruments in a way that choruses with them. Notation for pieces will be amended with instructions like ‘blend with notes from siren’, or more succinctly, with pointers like ‘train 4’, to show what recording the musicians are becoming a part of. Performers provide a simultaneous counterpart to sounds that Bailie considers ‘historical’, once a moment happening in the present but now something collected from the past.
Take Trains. A piece written for various recordings of trains, it reflects back sounds that once happened, were there in the present, and now quite thoroughly don’t exist. With its semi-spiralling string work, Trains is captivatingly dreary, the violinists groaning their way down an octave as if they were struggling to complete a yawn. Bailie has previously described field recordings as having ‘a feeling of realness and immediacy’ despite being ‘historical, in a very mundane sense of the word’. She doesn’t distil realism with them, or give you an accurate representation of a circumstance that will repeat. Instead, these recordings appear otherworldly, as slow and strange as nostalgic memories. They never quite sound as in sync with us as they should.
Bailie likes to deal in eras. Using film and sound to demonstrate the clear differences in years and decades, her music has investigated how a period can feel. When we think about history, we naturally end up with contradictions, combining the objective differences that exist between eras with the qualities we prescribe to them ourselves – the imagination we’ve worked up for the years we haven’t lived through. The stunning Roll Call is perhaps Bailie’s best work about memory. Focusing on a black and white school photograph she found in her parents’ house, it begins with a spoken annotation of a boy in the picture, who happens to be her father. She delves into his past while the camera fades on to other members of the school, unfolding their stories. Slowly, the picture expands, rolling through headshots, fumbling for a history that might account for them.
Eventually, the speaker runs out of anecdotes for the subjects, opting instead to play stray piano notes for those without a story. There are no more names to mention, and the piece becomes wordless, a mesh of anonymous faces and sharp chords. The photo brims with history – but where we can find that history is eerily uncertain. In Bailie’s hands, time is mysterious, irreparable, and hard to really solve. Who can say why it changes personality, why it gets remembered differently? Roll Call is happy to leave us halfway there.