2009, Dragon's Eye Recordings de5023
Limited Edition of 250

CD and sleeve in MINT condition
Packaged in clear vinyl sleeve with folded insert.

1. A Three Month Warm Up (77")

Jamie Drouin

A Three Month Warm Up uses 124 individual field recordings made in an outdoor public square in Victoria (British Columbia, Canada) over a three month period, and is inspired by the cacophony of notes played by a symphony during warm up, where a single unified tone emerges out of the various instruments and voices. In playing back the ambient recordings, filtering them down to their essential 'notes' and layering the events, Drouin creates a sonic signature of the space, as if a residual echo of everything that occurred during those three months has been trapped within the structure.

A Three Month Warm Up was a site specific work created for the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's Assume Nothing exhibition January-May, 2009. Curated by Lisa Baldissera.

Textura Review:
A site specific work created by Drouin for a 2009 Art Gallery of Greater Victoria exhibition, A Three Month Warm Up presents an uninterrupted windstorm assembled from 124 individual field recordings made in an outdoor public square in Victoria, British Columbia over a three-month period. Though Drouin took his inspiration from the multitude of notes heard during a symphony orchestra's warm-up, he shapes those varying instrument sounds into a singular mass, specifically a blurry behemoth that seethes, rumbles, and howls for seventy-seven minutes. Drouin filtered down the original recordings to their essence and then layered them to form the gargantuan mass documented on the recording. Imagine the sounds a microphone would pick up dangling from the wing of a 747 at its greatest height and you'll have a pretty good idea of what the recording sounds like. It's not a monochromatic drone, however; muffled traces of instrument tones and pitches can be detected at the center, seemingly struggling to wrest themselves from the vortex and separate from the mass. The piece also undergoes subtle changes in intensity, with the feverish pitch of one section giving way to a more subdued attack halfway through. Fifty minutes in, string tones briefly surge to the forefront before becoming mere whispers murmuring at the periphery. When the piece comes to a close, it disappears into silence like a plane gradually vanishing into the sky. Drouin never falters in sustaining the captivating work's impact as it repeatedly undergoes, often almost imperceptibly, such metamorphoses.