John K. Samson of Winnipeg’s The Weakerthans once sang a plea (in the voice of a cat named Virtute) to “ask the things you shouldn’t miss / tape hiss and the modern man / cold war and card catalogs / to come join us if they can.” Those lines came to mind while I listened to the electroacoustic compositions on Manuella Blackburn’s Interruptions, which have a relationship to the past—and its perpetual seeping into the present—that is central to their mode, methodology, and even melody.
Interruptions presents nostalgia through a lens of digital reconstitution. Opener “Home Truths” is the audio equivalent of too many open browser tabs. Blackburn confronts and attempts to repurpose distractions that plague our wired worlds, where oases of quiet are shattered by alarm tones, bombardments of information, and the stress-inducing rush of footsteps and slamming doors. Yasunao Tone’s experiments with digital damage echo in the skipped beats and recursive moments of “Microplastics” and other pieces. The sense of a natural world permeated by a residue of the past that refuses to disappear is yet another, more toxic kind of cultural byproduct.
Blackburn’s more positive survey of nostalgia takes her from the eight-inch floppy discs of the vintage Fairlight CMI Series II to the contents of her cupboards and their trove of photos and souvenirs. But the closing track, “Landline,” is where she unlocks the music of the recent past. The piece, which won first prize in the 2018 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest, creates a kind of symphony from the dial tones and electronic connections that once were the basis of worldwide communication. Beneath a kind of quaintness in revisiting the imperfect crackles of analog sound, there is a deeper summary of our constant changing and its many pluses and minuses—or perhaps its encroaching ones and zeroes.
