BONNETTA, JOSHUA - Innse Gall

"Bridging acoustic ecology and interdisciplinary creative practice, Joshua Bonnetta returns to Shelter Press with Innse Gall "The Islands of the Strangers", his second LP for the label. Recorded and assembled between 2017 and 2020 and acting as a companion piece to Bonnetta's film, An Dà Shealladh "The Two Sights", these two interrelated side-long works -- "Innse Gall I" and "Innse Gall II" -- respectively deploy a rigorous approach to field recording and auditory phenomena, pursuing the complex relationship between landscape, place, language, and culture in the Outer Hebrides, where both the film and album's source material was gathered. Since the late 2000s, Canadian artist Joshua Bonnetta has cultivated a highly singular interdisciplinary creative practice that spans film, video, sound, performance, and installation. Bonnetta's use of film, photography, and sound recording operate in close, generative dialog with each other; a photograph indicating the proximity and urgency of sound, a sound indicating the necessity for moving image, and a film utilizing the ocular to forward a realm of sonority. Each discreet element of his output -- a film, record, photograph, etc. -- is regarded as autonomous while interconnected with, and dependent on, other realms of perception and experience; the artist and object acting as a subjective lens, inquiring after the nature of human experience and the diverse, latent psychological realities at juncture of inherited history, culture, place, and self. While very much the byproduct of sound collage, rather than the states of abstraction and "pure" sonority most often pursued by musique concrète, or an experimental music "free of individual taste and memory (psychology)", as pursued by John Cage, Bonnetta's work displays a deeper sympathy with Luc Ferrari's notion of "anecdotal music". Innse Gall comprises two audio works constructed by Bonnetta from field recordings made on the Outer Hebrides islands of Barra, Berneray, North Uist, Harris, and Lewis between 2017-19. Drawing upon Bonnetta's fascination with sound as a primary means to survey place and people, Innse Gall draws upon a vast range of sonorous material: hydrophone recordings made over extended periods in lobster creels and of gases escaping a peat bog, interview fragments, and field recordings feature capturing the sounds of maritime industry, song, seals, corncrake, snipe, and other elements of the natural world. Meticulously collaged and reworked within an exploration of the interrelated acoustic ecology of these diverse elements of the islands' make-up, the album's two works bristle with the subcutaneous narratives embedded within these ancient and modern landscapes, played against the disappearing Gaelic oral traditions which hold their memories, resulting in a deep, auditory reflection on the relationship between narrative, environment, and the reciprocal influences they exact upon one another. Includes heavyweight reverse board inner sleeve; accompanied by a sixty-page booklet containing extensive photographic studies made for The Two Sights by the artist and an essay by Erika Balsom, as well as a postcard to download the film An Dà Shealladh "The Two Sights"." - Shelter Press .