Great singers are often as much great microphone artists as they are vocal artists. Think Frank Sinatra or Al Bowlly. The power, the effect of their performances, comes largely from the way they use the microphone. I recently heard an offhand comment from singer-songwriter Jennifer Walshe, in which she mentioned that she always sings into a microphone (which is far from a given in concert hall music). Then last week, watching her play with all kinds of strange objects and instruments for her residency at Café Oto, I realized there was someone who could put anything in front of a microphone and make it sound good. A great microphone artist.

There aren’t really many voices Disorder (Act IV). There’s air and breathing and all sorts of strange grunting and panting and drooling sounds, but no vowels, no pitch, no vibrating vocal cords. And yet, like Al Bowlly singing “Hang out the Stars in Indiana,” this is largely a record about proximity to a microphone — or rather, several unique, carefully selected microphones — and a mouth .

Lorenzo Abattoir is a sound artist from Turin, Italy who has devoted the last few years to an intense study of what he calls “three key concepts for the artist: breathing, amplification and movement” (according to content inside the album). sleeve). This is the fourth “act” of this study, which began with Flag Day Recordings. Disembodiment in 2023. From the start, it’s a very intense listen. The word “immersive” is thrown around a lot in music writing these days, but Disorder (Act IV) is a positively enveloping experience. That is to say, putting it on feels a bit like being eaten.

In the past, I’ve spent hours meticulously editing out unwanted mouth noises from vocal takes. I search Logic’s track window to find that little gasp, that brief grunt, a momentary lip smack. Cut on each side. Cut it. Crossfade carefully to close the gap. Abattoir Here may have been rummaging through my trash and, like a sonic womble “making good use of the things ordinary people leave behind,” he has now assembled this wild collage, this tender noise music, this austere metamorphosis Deleuzian.

Disorder (Act IV) it doesn’t really look like anything else. It may share some DNA with the tinny sounds of Steve Roden and Jeph Jerman, with the free, gobby improvisational vocals of Phil Minton and Dylan Nyoukis, even with the whispered, shuffled soundtrack of the odd horror movie (2022) by Kyle Edward Ball. Skinamarinkbut it is also, in many significant and immediately apparent ways, unlike any of those things. One day, perhaps filmmakers will use this disc as a reference point for composing the sound for the transformation scene in their new werewolf movie. Until then, this will be an album that will take pride of place among the weirdest tracks in my record collection, somewhere between Los Angeles Free Music Society and that album I once bought on the beats of aberrant hearts and intended for the training of cardiologists. Abattoir turned around for this record. I feel completely digested. A great microphone artist.