I've a feeling I should probably credit this as the work of Sara Lamb and Nigel Ayers. It's Nigel's sonic counterpart to the paintings of Sara Lamb, recently partnered as something along the lines of an installation in the wilds of Lostwithiel, Cornwall. I'm not sure whether the sound is a response to the paintings, or whether it's the other way around, or perhaps six of one and a half dozen of the other. YouTube footage shows the paintings on display along with a stack of sketchbooks in a caravan of the type once drawn by horses, with this music supplementing the ambience. I'm not certain whether the caravan is the only place the gestalt has been presented, but if so it's something I can appreciate given that neither artist seems entirely aligned with anything you might term the usual channels.
I've had occasion to frown upon persons who make a funny noise, stick it through a reverb unit with the decay set to twenty-five years, then call it dark ambient. The sonic component of The Vault is deceptively minimal with sounds resembling bells repeated as an intermittent organic rhythm against a distant wall of its own delay set to at least a century, the effect of which is neither dark nor entirely ambient. If anything it has the celestial sound of something vast and radiantly bright which is cumulatively overpowering despite the sense of space - akin to watching sunrise in a locale where you can no longer hear traffic. It does the same thing for an hour, or presumably for as long as you want if you visited the installation - which isn't quite the right word but I'm sure you know what I mean. Yet it feels as though it's constantly changing, or maybe evolving, yet might also be deemed timeless. It isn't noise, and it's thematically the opposite of industrial, for those of you who need to know such details.
As I expect I've said before, much of Nigel's work - at least this century - sounds like the result of an almost geological compositional process closer to the spread of lichen across granite than plugging it in to see what sort of scary sounds we can come up with; and Sara Lamb's painting appears to share some of this quality - a channelling which occurs regardless of the broader spectrum of western art, almost regardless of the person holding the brush or twiddling the oscillator—not so much outsider art as true art, something many of us no longer recognise through having become so accustomed to that which is served up by the factories.
In the event of none of the above making sense, it's jolly good.
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