Wil Bolton – Chimes for a Wall Drawing

Wind is the ultimate free traveller: constantly on the move, it knows neither where it is going or where it has been. It carries with it the scents and odours of distant lands, the dusts and sediments of deserts and mountains, but it cannot remember which souvenir it collected where, or in what order. If it has a memory at all, it is in the sculptures it carves into rocks and stones, the furrows it ploughs and holes it bores, writing the landscape. The accumulation of wind-blown silt, known as loess, is responsible for some of the planet’s most fertile soils.

The regular vertical lines of Sol LeWitt’s “Wall Drawing #1136” (2004) can be thought of as marking time; the irregular wave that crosses them is wind. LeWitt did not execute many of his wall drawings himself. Instead, he came up with the ‘concept’ in the form of a set of instructions, which were then carried out by an assistant. By emphasising the concept or the idea over the physical expression of it, LeWitt hoped to produce an art that was objective, timeless, coming from nowhere and going nowhere. The marks left by art would not be the art itself, but the traces of its passing, its writing, its sediment.

Wil Bolton’s “Chimes for a Wall Drawing” is a live recording made in the room where “Wall Drawing #1136” was shown at Tate Liverpool in 2009. Delicate chimes, handbells and guitar meander through long processed tones and sound recordings of the gallery and environs. Like LeWitt’s wave, “Chimes for a Wall Drawing” doesn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular, and it doesn’t seem in a particular hurry to get there. It does however sound as if it has come a long way: heavy use of echo carries images of remote, windswept steppes and desert plains. In this way the music leaves its traces on the imagination. Souvenirs of sound without label or catalogue, deposited haphazardly and without explanation. Upon listening I found my thoughts gently shaped and smoothed, blown clean by a fresh breeze.

“Chimes for a Wall Drawing”, originally available on Cathedral Transmissions in a digipack CD edition of just 50 copies is now up for grabs in a digital version via Bandcamp and comes highly recommended.

- Nathan Thomas for Fluid Radio

www.wilbolton.co.uk
www.cathedraltransmissions