Hazel Smith:
Nuraghic Echoes
The tape of Nuraghic Echoes runs for the same forty minutes as LPs used to. So much for print. As with everything else I've heard by Hazel Smith, the text here is tailored very closely to a specific (female) speaking voice, with its own distinctive accent - "Starting to watch her life in reverse" or the "wall/outlaw/stall/waylay/weep/wail" sequence (p. 3) wouldn't, and in fact doesn't, sound too good spoken by a Scottish man. The attempt at differentiating among the text's three voices by means of sound treatment (v1 is given a cavelike echo; v3 seems to be speaking in a large room or hall; v2 is roughly anechoic) is only carried so far: any voice can partake of the amplification structure associated with any other (in section 2c, voice 2's Story is trailed by an echo not unlike v3's). This instability carries over into the tone of Smith's delivery within the individual voices: the ironic lecturing of v1's first paragraph on p. 2 (which even comes over in print "...was born around 1500 BC and was surprisingly free from malaria") is quickly dropped, leaving the rest of this section with as neutral a tone as the piece achieves anywhere. While it's easy to pick up on the often humorous distancing of the archaistic/futuristic voices 1 and 3 (voice 3 with its "out-semination sessions", "information snodes" and "library feels"), voice 2 presents quite contradictory aspects to the (Pages-)reader and to the listener. Located in contemporary Australia, the voice of a woman poet who arrived from England in the eighties, voice 2 is, on the face of it, the one most likely to be identified with Hazel Smith herself. Smith's realisation of it does not encourage the identification: v2's paragraph at the bottom of page 1 is delivered like a self-deceiving litany from a self-help manual. Thus forewarned, the listener (or this one at least) is able to read such tonally ambiguous passages as "He blew inside his didgeridoo..." (because, no doubt, he could) as firmly ironic or satirical in thrust. The conclusion of this technique is in the long section 2c - far funnier on tape than on paper, though warning bells should be run anyway by the "pointy" stones and the "hard" man who "dares" to pull (and pull and pull) out stones from inside the woman. Smith's hyper-critical delivery (try saying "This is the saddest day of your life" as if "you" mean it) is suddenly dropped, with "Then you realise..." (p. 8), to a near-identification of voice with text, and the transition is very moving. In the closing minutes of the piece, in the sound-ballet of improvisation 3a, stones take on kinetic associations, "a woman throwing stones", "white sails", "skies", "a woman flying", "free".
While Smith's performance allows Nuraghic Echoes to achieve a precariously optimistic conclusion in the emergence of female self-determination, the real fascination of the piece for me lies in its insistence on the directionlessness and eternal presence of time ("time un(w)rapped", "time dismembered" as section 1c has it) and on the fluidity of character - all set, however, within a structure as rigidly and conspicuously framed as Beckett's Play. If the opening lines lead to expectations of a simple alternation or interweaving of tenses and persons, the continual slippage between eras, voices (how can the same voice both lecture on and inhabit the Nuraghic past?) and tones ends up projecting the mandala (mirror mirroring mirror, echo echoing echo) of a subject-in-progress:
from space into sound
from sound into sense
from sense into subjectivity.
The collaboration with Roger Dean has its weaker aspects (the treated sounds of clay pots and stones throw up echoes of Cage and Cardew, not always to Dean's advantage), but its strengths become apparent when the piece is heard through stereo headphones: the Tirade (2aiii) of constructed language (with its associations of stone, rock, tomb, kangaroo, "licapub") is treated with a different delay in each channel, to incredibly disorienting effect - like forgetting to take your 3D specs off when the movie's over. After this the lengthy and uneventful Silent Nuraghi provides the respite needed if the listener is going to have any hope at all of assimilating Story.
The film reference is intentional: Nuraghic Echoes is a sountrack - the nearest thing to listening to Derek Jarman's Blue broadcast as the radio play it wasn't. You can't film a self coming into being, and you can't film blindness, but these pieces imply that you don't need to. Normal service will be resumed.
This response to the recorded version of Hazel Smith's Nuraghic Echoes first appeared in Pages magazine, London 1995. Page references are to that issue of the magazine.
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