Presence through absence: The Sight Below's 'Stagger'
I'm always interested in how artists portray their performance space, as it were, in their tracks. People often think this becomes irrelevant when you're writing electronic music – it's all inside the laptop, right? – but if anything the opposite is true. Experimental electronic artists often, intentionally or not, create imaginary performance spaces when they write a track, irrespective or whether they think their track doesn't really have a 'performer', as in a human being playing the instruments. Western listeners hear what sound like instruments and attach a certain agency to those sounds. At that point, the track stops being just a bunch of sounds, and becomes a landscape with some one in it. Once that 'performer' of sound is located, tracks can develop narratives based around the question of the performer's presence in the track. One of the tracks I've noticed this most clearly in is the beautiful 'Stagger' by The Sight Below. The...