Tarab

***Corroded locations where mankind has scarred the surface of the Earth feature prominently in the work of Melbourne based sound artist EAMONN SPROD, documented through field recording and sympathetic actions with found objects from those sites. One such location that features prominently in Take All of the Ships... is Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay. Once the home of an immigration station at the turn of the 20th Century and later a Nike Missile site for the US military, Angel Island now rests in the hands of the US National Park Service, which has left some of the buildings to succumb to the forces of decay. From the sounds culled from this site and others closer to his antepodean home, TARAB diligently overlays and stitches together a highly tactile composition with very few digital treatments. As the opening ominous rumble, with its frequencies appearing to emerge from the center of the Earth and liquefying the surface upon impact, ebb and flow, Tarab unveils a revolving series of exaggerated details from a hyperbolic gash of two heavy pieces of metal grinding against themselves to a toxic chorale of nighttime insects to sand, wind, and surf detourned into sedimentary white noise. Tarab's compositional sensibility shifts throughout the album, at first sparsely situating these sounds into shadowy vignettes. Gradually, an arcing crescendo exhibits sustained harmonics rarely heard in the best of the contemporary dronemusik technicians, much less from the realm of sound ecology.